Variant issue 4

'-\

ART

IDEAS

Number 4

Price: £1

*

. ■ • i

: i

:

m&:r.

T

• -. • _.- -* -.■*.!■ *~}

». "*■•• J)''^ ty . A'* *^"

B??" ?

v1*»" ^l£

. '»^ .- • . m#*t

w ..... •--.

'"**»- ' *■

PROJECTS U.K.

Post-MODERNISM

LIVE ART: 60s to the 80s

Roland Miller

ALISTAIR MacLENNAN

VIDEO AT THE NATIONAL REVIEW

"AVE '87"
JOSPENCE
CRITICAL REALISM
JfiplNDREJ DUDEK-DURER
:S :: EINSTURZENDE NEUBATEN

■ •*-*9 . «-; - * ■ ^ ' • •

SPRING

• . g

i

Variant - ISSUe 4 Published in Glasgow

s

CONTENTS

G.

>.

X

4
6
8

14
16
18

19

22

24

26
27
29
31

36
38

40

Editorial - States of Being Actual °(?^ % .

Action-Time- Vision: news, etc. *P - /o

Roland Miller: "All mad, drugged or drunk" -
Performance Art from the 70s to the 80s.
Alex Fulton: Projects U.K. interviewed.
Alistair Dickson: Screen and Projection.

Art in Performance: Jane Bartlett, Sabine
Buerger, Louise Crawford.

William Clark: 'AVE '87', audio-visual
experimental festival in Holland.

Douglas Aubrey: Video-Documentation and
Installation at the National Review of Live Art.

Hazel McLaren: Notes on Discord -
Einsturzende Neubaten.

Alistair MacLennan: 'Out the In'.
Alistair MacLennan interviewed.
Karen Eliot: 'A Polish Story'.
Peter Suchin: Post-Modernism and the 'Post-
Modern Debate in Britain': An Introduction.

Simon Brown: 'Critical Realism' reviewed.

Lorna Waite: Towards Disrupting the Silenced
- the images of Jo Spence.

Letter: Ken Curry.

The artists' items appearing on pages 17, 23, 35 and 39 are an
anonymous contribution. They are not illustrations for the articles
appearing on those pages.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

D Roland Miller is an artist working mainly in the area of live art, and he is
coordinator of the N.A.A. in England. He lives in Sheffield. □ Alex Fulton
is an artist and freelance writer. □ Jon Bewley and Simon Herbert are
organisers at Projects U.K. in Newcastle. □ Alistair Dickson lives and
works in Stirling. He is a member of the Here and Now magazine group.
□ Jane Bartlett is an artist who lives in London. □ Louise Crawford is an
artist who lives in Edinburgh. □ Douglas Aubrey is an artist working
mainly in video, is a co-member of video artist team Pictorial Heroes. He
lives in Glasgow. □ William Clark (a.k.a. Billy) is an artist, and is co-
ordinator at Transmission. He lives in Glasgow. D Hazel McLaren is an
artist who lives in Berlin. She is presently undergoing a 'residency' in a
hamburger bar. □ Alistair MacLennan is an artist who lives and works in
Belfast. □ Karen Eliot is a multiple name. □ Peter Suchin is an abstract
painter and writer who lives in Leeds, n Simon Brown is a painter who
lives in Glasgow. N Lorna Waite is a writer and researcher who lives in
Edinburgh.

Variant aims to:

document new areas of artistic endeavour
promote diversity through experimental art
discuss art in a social and political context.

Variant welcomes articles, writings, artists'
piece and other items. Suggestions for
areas to be covered are invited. Advance
publicity for events is required if they are
to be covered adequately. Unsolicited
material cannot be guaranteed publication,
though the editor will reply to all items
intended for publication and items of
correspondence. An SAE should be
included for return of material and
photographs.

Deadline for issue 5: 30th April 1988.

All material must be typewritten in double
spacing and accompanying photographs
and graphics provided, if applicable.

All material copyright Variant and the
authors.

Apologies: to Edward Woodman for not
crediting his name to the photograph
accompanying the article on Art in Ruins in
issue 3.

Editor: Malcolm Dickson.

Typesetting and printing: Clydeside Press

(041552 5519).

Additional Design: Ian Mathei. Clydeside

Press.

Additional proofreading^ Tracy Smith.

Additional layout: Peter Thomson.

Logo: Madelene MacGregor.

Thanks to some other folk who have been

supportive beyond the call of duty.

Front cover photo: Billy Clark.

Back cover photo: 'Resistance' - Andrej

Dudek-Durer.

Distributod in London by Counter

Distribution. Elsewhere distributed by
Variant.

Variant is an entirely independent
publication and seeks your subscription
(see item). Sellers are sought (20%
commission on all sales).

SUBSCRIPTIONS: £5 per year, equivalent in
Europe plus 20% postage. USA, Canada.
Australia and Eastern Europe. £5 in
equivalent currency plus 100% postage.

SUBSCRIPTIONS AND SPONSORSHIP: £10

per year.

Advertise in Variant - sharpen up your
image.

Quarter page (vertical format): £35.
Half page: £70.
Full page: £140.

All that's progressive!

STATES OF BEING ACTUAL

'LIVE ART IS a term used in the 80's to describe a number of almost
specialist artforms which emerged from anti-specialist activities,
abundant in the 60s and first half of the 70s, which represented a
rupture with the traditional high art forms. The 'live' element implies a
more engaging relationship with art object/event and audience
through this rupture of normal, passive, viewing conditions. Otherwise
known as 'time-based' media, it includes installation forms, media-
orientated approaches, non-object art, video, film, performance.
Installation is not an art form in itself, but a way of uniting various
elements within a specific environment and into a greater whole (the
'installation') - installations may use any of the above. This may not
incorporate any 'live' element as such, though there will be an audio-
visual element, a time-component and a certain demand and
audience reciprocation that might characterise it alongside
performance. 'Performance' art will require the physical presence of
the artist or others as the motivating element in the construction of an
event/art object. The physical presence of the performance artist
interacts with three elements; place/location, body/actions,
audience/viewer/participant, through the experience of the 'live'
situation, the one-off event.

The 'anti-tradition' of performance art can be followed in swerving
paths through a number of 'anti-tradition' and/or 'anti-art'
manifestations; Happenings, Fluxus, Environmental Art, Body Art,
Conceptual Art and Assemblage (in no order of priority). Though all of
these attacked the public view and (often) the artists' own view of the
artist as an isolated and privileged being in society, they are now well-
placed in the tradition of visual high culture. The original political
intention of 'breaking out of the gallery' was to engage with real life
situations. This is commonplace today, though the radical intention
may be confused, if apparent at all, and 'performance' has now found a
popularity among the art community that it now represents a genre.

Definitions as to what performance art is are still lacking, and maybe
rightly so in something that was perceived by its protagonists in the
70s as anti-category and anti-specialist. It may be said that all art
involves an element of performance, or it may be further said that
performance is a 'function' at work in the process of the artist's
materials. Cultivation of a genre without the critical analysis of art's
possible social dimension in a time of capitalist reconstitution (arts
funding moving into the private sector, for example) will be a serious
error on the part of arts advocators. Though there may be no end
product in a performance, it does not presume an intransigence in the
face of the flexibility of capitalist ideology, nor does it necessarily
subvert commodity exchange values which are continuing to
dominate all activity and all experience. To a certain extent, we may
applaud the marketing of performance art since it represents an
'efficient' and 'responsible' attitude, and also gets the artists paid,
though it fails to address the bankruptcy of present culture. Further
breadth and complexity in cultural activity will emerge through a
resilient evaluation from that bankruptcy.

Once more, the mode of production of the artist activities are again
stressed. This means more than fashionably 'commenting' on political
and social issues, or in taking art 'outside the gallery'. Praising this on
the basis that more people see it implies that art has a separate power and
innate qualities beyond our tangible presence in the world, and
beyond the artists' intentions (if they have any). Whilst this illustrates
the fact that art galleries as finishing houses for art products are not
particularly conducive to more meaningful levels of experience
outside everyday, functional activities, art outside the gallery does not
change our way of seeing the streets, and is as equally defined by the
traditions of gallery convention. The current emphasis on 'site-
specific' work and sculpture is illustrative of this (TSWA project, art in
the Garden Festivals). 'Site-specific' doesn't guarantee a political
motivation on the part of the artist or the curator, nor does it bridge any
gap of alienation between 'art' (high) and a non-specialist-art
audience, or what is commonly referred to as 'the man in the street' . as
if all art had a message of wisdom for all the uninitiated. This defuses
the radical possibilities for art, with no effective change whilst evoking
the characteristics of an egalitarian gesture; the right for everyone to

experience art just by looking at it or coming across it in the street. Art
does require an audience to challenge. Art is not art simply by
declaration. It also requires a critical context in its distribution and in
its ideological import. The issue being addressed here then is in how
artists perceive their roles which are formed within the enclosed
system of the art world, but must, of necessity, be re-identified within
an active political/social sphere. This is inevitable in the articulation
of a life-process which is - in itself - never free, but always determined
by political constraints and social repression.

Art that meant anything at all in the 60s was part of a counter-culture
that took art into the streets, the barriers between artist and audience
being confronted directly. Roland Miller was the main protagonist in
the People Show who involved themselves in ritual and street theatre,
combining elements of 'fun', art with often direct political statements.
In his article, he provides some historical perspective to such activities
and finds the link with Happenings still existent in the work of many
artists today, but with particular reference to an 'unofficial' (not
institutionally funded) theatrical performance by Sarah Moreell seen
in Sheffield in 1986. His article is a complement to 'The Art That
Moves: An Exhibition of documents from the development of British
Performance Art. from the sixties to the eighties' which has been seen
in some regional art galleries over the past year.

'Live art' for many artists is a valid way of working when articulating
political sensibilities and creative concepts which may be problematic
in other areas. It was the impetus in the 60s and still is today, that 'live
art' fuses innovative form with progressive content. In the booklet
accompanying the exhibition, Roland Miller writes:

Art as a form of 'voicing' for the inarticulate; art as a
way of passively, creatively, expressing dissent; art
as a form of collective action; above all, art as a
form of democracy; all these claims can be made
for performance.

All of Roland Miller's activities have been regionally based, not relying
on the cultural domination of London. This was also the case for the
Basement Group (based in Newcastle) which later became Projects
U.K. In the late 70's it was the continued commitment of the Basement
Group to experimental art which has now provided the support
structure, through such organisations as Projects U.K., which time-
based work requires (not forgetting Performance Magazine which
covered new ground and new work otherwise never heard of through
visual art magazines in Britain). It has not simply been a case of
popularising performance art and time-based work, but for Projects
U.K. in encouraging artists' social concerns, and in creating new work
which is issue-based. This has been apparent in 'New Work Newcastle
86' and 'New Work Newcastle 87 On Tour' which the organisers John
Bewley and Simon Herbert mention in their interview. As Simon
Herbert indicates in his catalogue essay to the latter touring show,
performance may well be perceived to be endemic to our media
dominated world, but it can also make a significant contribution in our
understanding and comprehension of it, thereby engendering a
critique of it.

In 'Screen and Projection', Alistair Dickson reviews four performances
seen recently in Glasgow. At the outset he admits he is indulging in 'the
most detested vice of the critic: theorising after the fact', which three of
the artists whose performances he reviewed felt obliged to respond
with in their own factual descriptions about their works. The review
itself, and the responses, raises questions about the act of first hand
observation of performance and the difficulties encountered it
writing about it which may misrepresent what actually occurred
during the 'real-time' of the event. Such questions lead on to the
element of documentation in performance, which in many cases
(given that many performances are specific to time and place and
thereby seen only by a few) replaces the experience of the live event for
its mediation through photographs and video. In his article, Douglas
Aubrey criticises the saturation of documentation crews at the
National Review of Live Art last year. He then goes on to review the

video element of the Review which he feels was peripheralised to the
main programme of performance.

In contrast, video at the audio-visual-experimental festival held for a
third time in Amhem, Holland, this year formed the backbone of the
event, with continuous single monitor screenings and a continual
turnover of video installations. The purpose of 'AVE '87' was to provide
a platform for showing work by young artists working in the area of
audio-visual presentation, but also forming international links and
contacts between the participants. 'AVE *87' went for an art that was
'difficult' and 'inaccessible', unlike the formality of British events. In
contrast to Britain, Europe allows cross-border travel between
countries and thereby allows a creative interaction to build up through
the proliferation of European festivals.

Berlin-based Einsturzende Neubaten enact a form of ritual theatre
operating mainly on the 'rock group' context, though their 'image',
lyrics and sound can be related to an art context. Blake's quote could
be applied here when he said "The road of excess leads to the palace of
wisdom", Hazel McLaren, in her piece 'Notes on Discord', suggests
that the destruction (of self, of art, of societal structures) expressed by
individuals from the Vienna Group, to Artaud, to the Situationists. and
the anger of early punk records are taken up by Neubaten in the
present through their stage performances and the dislocation of
structure and narrative in their 'music'.

For Alistair Mac Lennan art is also the substance of supercession from
the 'ugly' social realities in which the individual lives and a way of
dealing with them. His more considered analysis sees art as going
beyond the secondhand experience which individuals endure in the
circle of a shallow survival. Fine art has to rethink what it is doing and
move towards the fusion of spiritual, political, social, economic and
cultural elements, otherwise it deserves all the attacks currently being
made upon it by conservative ideology. His performances involve his
presence as the animating focus, which melds together with a variety
of objects imbued with strong personal and social symbolism. These
are long durational ritual pieces using minimal bodily movement
which on first appearance might look like some form of trance state.
This is not ritual in the sense of a preoccupation wrth esoterics or of a
mystical sensibility, but like artists such as Stuart Brisley and Joseph
Beuys, the work is motivated by a social dimension and informed by a
political critique. Here, the art and the political are one and the same
thing, from a social process of world comprehension. MacLenna's
haunting images resonate long after the real-time performance and all
that is left is one or two photographs plus an arduous description of the
work from the observer. At which point, then, is a performance
complete? In the mediation of a photograph or written review? In the
minds of those who attended the event and in what the take away? In
the work's ability to engage public discussion after the event? It does
involve elements from all these questions, and more, probably. This
again reinforces the emphasis on the singularity of an event, on the
first hand observation of it. The nature of Mac Lennan's work cannot be
comprehended without this, nor without an understanding that his
activity stems from being actual-in-the-world and not separated from
it through his role

Without an audience, is art not just private ritual? Some artists choose
to make no distinction between their normal everyday activities (such
as eating, pissing or sleeping) and what they perceive to be 'art'. Their
art and their perception of themselves are one, they become the art
object. Polish artist Andrej Dudek-Durer makes no such distinction
almost to the point of parodying himself as an artist in between fantasy
and reality. He considers himself to be the re-incarnation of Albrecht
Durer and defines his work as 'metaphysical-telepathic activity'. But
there is no parody in Dudek-Durer' s approach and it is based on the
need for deeper levels of communication between individuals. His
activity involves prints and drawings, performance, video,
photographs and music, and he has for many years been an active
correspondent in the international mail art network. The Polish writer
Andrej Kolkowski has written that:

...he develops or exposes photographs showing his
own look, juxtaposes them with his person in the
flesh. He marks this or that with his signature or
other inscription. He is filling time with his own

existence, multiplying traces of this existence...

The artifacts that Dudek-Durer produces might be seen as the public
performance or the public presence of a serious private ritual/
process.

In 'A Polish Story' Karen Eliot uses the story format as 'an entertaining
way of putting over an idea' and avoids the conventional review-type
critique. The list of activities at the end of the story may, on first glance,
seem mundane and irrelevant, but according to Karen Eliot 'the itinery
actually re-inforces the real elements of the story and brings the
reader firmly firmly back to earth making him/her aware of the
actuality of the story.' These 'banal' activities of Dudek-Durer are
central to the formation of the whole. The author concludes: 'Without
the action of making bread his live correspondence would be
incomplete.' This approach and the multiple name or multiple identity
concept of Karen Eliot (several individuals all producing a magzine
called SMILE) is aimed at examining notions of individuality,
personality and creativity outside of the cult of individualism or career.
What appears as an aberration from the fragmentary indulgence of
postmodern art is. in fact, its transgressor.

For a number of years the term 'postmodernism' has been used in the
art world to describe current contemporary art practice. The editorial
in Variant 3 used a quote from Hal Foster from the intra to the book
'Post-Modern Culture' concerning the need to draw a dividing line
between a post-modernism of resistance and a post-modernism of
reaction. The former was applied to the work of Art in Ruins and to a
lesser extent *o Denis Masi. 'Post-modernism', however, is a term
which is still largely misunderstood if known about at all, despite
references to it in the glossy international art magazines, and in stuffy
debates at the I.C.A. Peter Suchin wrote his piece in response to a
request from a friend who kept encountering the term in contexts
where it was presented without definition, as though "everyone knew
what 'postmodernism' referred to." He further explains that it is
expository rather than polemical and states that "a critical approach to
terminology isn't mere pedantry and it's important to have more than
vague ideas about what is under discussion."

'Critical Realism' was an exhibition curated by Brandon Taylor which
attempted to go beyond the vagueness and indulgent forms of much
post-modernist art. Using the pictorial tradition of Realism, the
exhibition set out to examine current 'realities' of today's society (mass
unemployment, the arms build-up, the divisions between rich and
poor) through their 'representation' in a variety of conventional
artforms. The dichotomy between form and content is highlighted
here and the role of the artist as an observer (rather than a participant
in) the wider complexities of political and social life is enforced.
Presenting 'political' work in an exhibition such as this, as products,
and commodities, suggests that politics is an occupation amongst
others for artists and that art is a definitive activity.

In his review, Simon Brown sees the work of Jo Spence as an exception
to the rule of the show, in one instance because her work involves an
open approach through an innovative use of the photographic media,
and because her work explores the social and the personal that has the
ability to involve feeling through recognition when we struggle to apply
it to our own lives. As Lorna Waite discusses her photographic work in
the piece 'Towards Disrupting the Silenced', the work of Jo Spence is
unsettling, she shows us a record of her personal life with its
misfortunes and its unrealised potential. By showing us herself and
her ways of seeing herself, she us how our lives are represented and
fictionalised by and for us.

It becomes apparent when we consider her work that it is the areas of
sex and class which are real contradictions in society. She externalises
her struggle and the struggles of those around her, through family,
race, class, sex, between the personal and the social, between
ideology and actuality. This is an ongoing process of articulation, of
experiment, of ordering perceptions about the world, of imagination
and of keeping the future open. As Jo Spence puts it in her book
'Putting Myself In The Picture':

...there is no peeling away of layers to reveal a 'real'
self, just a constant reworking process. I realise
that I am the process.

ACTION TIME

VISION

A NEW PUBLIC ART
MURAL FOR GLASGOW

A N integral part of the Environmental
/* Art Course at Glasgow School of Art
-* -A. involves Third year students
undergoing a 3/4 week work experience with
artists working in specific communities or
other broader social contexts.

This year in the first term students have
worked with Alastair McCallum, at the
Cranhill Arts Project, in photography and
silkscreen workshops for local people. Others
worked with Hugh Graham at Glasgow Arts
Centre on a children's opera. Two other
groups worked with myself on two murals.
One an interior mural at the Douglas Inch
Centre, in Woodlands, and the other an
exterior mural on a large gable end in
Blackhill/Provanmill. Both groups were
assisted by a post-graduate student from
Chicago with some mural painting
experience.

The gable end mural was a major work in
terms of scale, setting and process (not to
mention the problems of climate and time of
year) which evolved as an almost model
example of collaboration. The beginning was
significant in that the invitation to do the work
came from the local community in the form of
the Community Council and the local ub
office of the Housing Department. The idea to
have a gable end painted with a mural had
already been generated and a local exercise
had been undertaken involving young people
to develop some ideas. I joined the project at
this point and, at a public meeting in the local
community centre, gave a slide talk showing
examples of external murals from other parts
of the world.

The aim of this exercise was to encourage a
broad view of what a mural could be and to
stimulate ideas from the adults of the local
community. This proved to be very
productive and out of the discussion major
elements of the concept began to develop.
There followed a series of evening drawing
workshops run by myself and three students
with the young people, not only to develop
their own ideas further but also to establish
close bonds between us and begin to
establish a team. With all the images and
ideas gathered locally we then brought our
own ideas to the work and set about setting on
a theme and design. These initial ideas were
presented at a further public meeting before
we finalised our proposal. The central idea
that evolved was that the mure I should
celebrate (local people said it should be
'bright and cheerful') the fact that in Blackhill
can be seen and enjoyed (thanks to some
enlightened thinking some time in the past

by some unknown district council engineer)
virtually the lasy remaining part of Glasgow's
'sacred river' the Molendinar Burn. Local
history has it that on the banks of the
Molendinar first Ninian and later Mungo
established sacred buildings which later
evolved into the Cathedral and thence into
Glasgow itself. The mural depicts a large
hand washing away the recent past and
reveals, through the windows of the
Cathedral, a view of Blackhill and Provanmill
with well known landmarks like the burn itself
and the legendary rhubarb patch. At the top
formal elements of stained glass identify the
place as Glasgow and there Mungo does a bit
of 'windae hinging'. A melee of transport
forms creating a fragmented lower part to the
mural. Finally a piece of trompe I'oeil depicts
some of the young people, who worked on the
whole project from the beginning to the end,
painting the mural from scaffolding.

From all this it can be gathered thatthe mural
speakers mainly to local ideas and images -
local to Glasgow and Blackhill and
Provanmill. Although the process of
collaboration, in the evolution and execution
of the work, reinforces the notion that people
can get involved in making some change to
the pi.ysical environment the mural itself
does not quite grasp the opportunity to say
something about the universal human
condition. It does however aspire to achieve a
magical quality. As Victor Shklovsky, the early
20th century Russian art critic, said, art
"exists to restore the feeling of life, to make
the stone feel stony." He may also have been
the first to articulate the concept of art

'making strange' in that it should act as a
counter to habituated experience. Talking to
people in Blackhill seems to bear this out.

David Harding, Head of Environmental Art
Joe Matunis, postgraduate Chicago Art

Institute
Meg McLucas, 3rd Year Environmental Art
Nathan Coley, 3rd Year Environmental Art
Alan Dunn, 3rd Year.Environmental Art
Marie Stewart, Secretary, Molendinar

Community Council
Danny O'Connor, Housing Officer, Blackhill

Sub Office

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
OF ARTISTS FOR
SCOTLAND?

FURTHER TO THE item on the National
Artists Association in Variant 3 by its co-
ordinator, Roland Miller, an 'exploratory
meeting' was held on January 19th in
Glasgow School of Art to discuss the setting
up of an organisation in Scotland which would
be linked to the N.A.A. in England through a
Standing Conference or associate
membership. 28 individuals attended from
a mail out of 150, and represented various
organisations: Glasgow and Edinburgh
Sculpture Workshops, Collective Gallery
(Edinburgh). Glasgow Arts Centre,
Transmission (Glasgow), Artists Newsletter,
NUS National Arts Panel, Open Circle, and
Scottish Arts Council. Since there was limited
time at the meeting's disposal, it was
assumed that those present were in general

agreement as to the need for an artists'
organisation in Scotland, so the implications
of such an organisation and how it would be
administered could not be dealt with at any
length.

The function of the N.A.A. in England is to
improve the conditions under which work is
made, and by extension to foster a collective
identity and representation around all areas
of art practice. Artists are, in a real sense,
isolated from one another and from the wider
structures within society. It has always
proved difficult to overcome the 'artist in the
garret'/artist as isolated individual
syndrome, which arguably has a strongergrip
in Scotland given its artistic tradition. Artists
are the last section of 'cultural workers' to
organise themselves into a coherent lobbying
force and political structure. Actors and
musicians are Trades Union aligned through
Equity and Musicians Union. The problem for
artists is further complicated bythefactthayt
they have no identifiable work-place, no
employers as such, and when they do identify
with one another, it is usually through the
interest of 'studio' situations.

Associations already exist in England (NAA),
Ireland (AAI), Northern Ireland (ACNI). and
Wales (AADW). They meet together twice a
year in a representative Standing
Conference, to discuss matters of mutual
importance, and formulate joint policies. The
lobbying powers of combined artists'
associations can be formidable!

Issues taken up by N.A.A. have been the
Exhibition Payment Right (E.P.R.), exhibition
contracts, codes of practice for residencies,
placements, discrimination in the art world.
Payment to artists for public access to their
work (E.P.R.) is now accepted as a right by the
A.C.G.B. This was recently shelved by the
Scottish Arts Council when they lobbied
artists for their opinions due to a low and
negative response. A representative of the
S.A.C. at the meeting held on the 19th
expressed difficulty in communicating to
artists and S.A.C. are eager to see an artists'
association emerge since then they would
have 'someone to talk to' with regard to
formulating policies etc.

It was agreed at this meeting to organise a
joint conference between N.A.A. and a
national organisation of artists in Scotland to
discuss the possibility of setting such an
organisation into motion. A main topic on the
agenda will be the need for decentralisation
and a network system throughout Scotland.
The first conference will be held in Glasgow,
the first week of July '88 at Glasgow School of
Art Students Union. Conferences thereafter
will take place in towns/cities outside the
main centres of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Further information about the conference or

items to be included on the agenda can be

obtained from:

Karen Strang, 59 Wallace St., Stirling. (0786)

50945 (day), (0786) 73702 (night).

Bob Strange, G.S.A. Students Representative

Council, 168 Renfrew St., Glasgow. (041) 332

0691).

There are a few items of interest regarding
artists organisation in Scotland available
from Variant as photocopies at 50p (plus
SAE):

N.A.A., by Roland Miller in Variant 3.

'Platform: Fees to Artists in Scotland' in

Alba 3.

Roland Miller on Artists Exhibition

Payment Right, from Artists Newsletter.

Conrad Atkinson interviewed by Malcolm

Dickson, from Edinburgh Review.

VIDEO

BEING DISTRIBUTED IN Scotland through
Variant is Mediamatics, the Dutch produced
'European Media Arts Magazine'. An
excellent produced and designed journal
with Dutch and English translations, it
provides in-depth (textual, philosophical)
debate and analysis of European video art.
Much coverage is given to European video
festivals, the relationship between video,
painting and sculpture (the sort of dialogue
and probing that doesn't seem to emerge in
Britain), on video installations, and the on-
going dichotomy of video as art and/or video
as proto-Television. Mediamatics maps out
the forms and ideas that make up video art's
heterogenity and acCords it with an
importance among other artforms and not
simply as a stylistic diversion or self-
indulgent medium.

Vol 2, number 2 is available (see contents of
issue in advertisement in this Variant) at £3,
plus 50p postage.

DEADLINES

'Sites/ Position': See notice in Variant 3
Deadline for proposals. 31st August 1988
This series of site specif ic works to take place
in early '89 Funding (allowing for
commission of work) is currently being
sought by EventSpace.

OUTSIDE/INSITE: Deadline for proposals
(see ad this issue) is March 31st.
PROJECTS U.K.: Deadline for proposals for
new commissioned work in February 29 (see
ad this issue).

VARIANT

PHOTOCOPIED SAMPLES OF 1 and 2
available at £1 plus 40p postage. Items
include 'Scottish Art Now' and 'Cultural
Guerillas' by Fergus More, 'Michelangelo's
Socks' by Simon Brown on the creative/
destructive, 2 items on Malcolm McLaren
and his Situationist influence.
A few copies of issue 3 available at £1 plus
40p p & p.

Issue 5: June '88; Deadline for contributions
is 31st April Items on Joseph Beuys and
Scotland, 'The Cenotaph Project', Stuart
Brisley, Banks and Vowles. Pavel Buchler

VARIANT EDITORIAL GROUP: Interested
individuals living in Scotland to contact the
editor. Individuals in this group would have
specific responsibilities as well as meeting
regularly to discuss Variant's direction.

LOVE

culture

FUCK

art

CREATE
88

body

sex
power
politic

88

KISS

SPIT

and

INJECT

energy into

The

Collective

Gallery

1 66 High Street,
Edinburgh

olTt^IdmnsTtT

i*

All mad, drugged

or drunk

m

PERFORMANCE

ART

FROM THE

70s

TO THE

80s

Roland
Miller

'Railway Images' Roland Miller and Shirley
Cameron, 1970, from 'Environments and Happen-
ings'.

ROLAND MILLER has been practising in the area of live arf since the late
60s. He became the main protagonist for the People Show in 1970 (replacing
Jeff Nuttall, who has recently re-joined) who enacted forms of ritual street
and landscape theatre under the influence of Happenings. With Shirley
Cameron, whom he collaborates with today, he founded Landscape
Gardening and Living Rooms who made, according to Adrian Henri in his
book 'Environments and Happenings', "simple ritual event-pieces in an
indoor and outdoor context: one of the most successful was done at the side
of a railway line, events to be glimpsed from train windows by the
passengers" (see photo). He also formed the Cyclamen Cyclists and the New
Fol-de-Rols who appeared at many of the arts festivals in England in the early
70s. In the following article he talks of the public and legal perceptions of one
particular piece, the political motivation of live art in the late 60s at
undercutting the emphasis on product rather than process, and criticises
current subsidy and establishment promotion of live art which he sees has
defused its radical intentions.

A LL mad. drugged or drunk - this

ZM mental, chemical and alcoholic

-*J- description of a piece of performance

art was offered in evidence at Leeds

Magistrates Court in November 23rd 1970.

The words were those of a Leeds housewife,
and we had been arrested for performing in
the courtyard of a block of flats in Hunslet.
They were a part of police evidence in a
prosecution for disorderly conduct. Our
defence, that the 6 of us were actually
involved in a painstaking, serious academic
exercise in 'environmental sculpture' was not
accepted. We pleaded guilty, as advised, and
got 2 years' conditional discharge.

The other defendants were Tony Earnshaw, a
fellow part-time lecturer in Leeds Poly Fine
Art Department, and four of our students. We
had been far from disorderly. The 'happening
was a finely structured, accurately timed
event, devised by John Goddard, one of the
students. 1

THE PRESS

Alerted by an enterprising local stringer, the
national press indulged in one of its periodic
convulsions about modern art.

The nation was alerted to this crazy
'happening' by headlines like:
ART EXERCISE WAS NIGHTMARE - TRENDY
ART EXERCISE - WHAT THE HOUSWIFE SAW
- FINE ART SCENE SHOCKS A WIFE - FREAK-
OUT IN STREET WAS JUST ROLAND'S ART
LESSON - ART COLLEGE'S FREAK-OUT WAS
NIGHTMARE FOR A WIFE - ART SCHOOL
'HAPPENING' AT FLATS SHOCKED
HOUSEWIFE - ROLY SHOCKS IT TO 'EM, AND
CALLS IT ART! - THE STREET STRIP SHOW
ENDS UP IN COURT.

There was nothing like a striptease. The
reports lacked today's viciousness, even if
they tended to sensationalise. Within the
same period work by myself and Shirley
Cameron, my partner, was dealt with in a
sympathetic full-page photo feature in the
Daily Express (a broadsheet paperthen) (15/
10/70). 2 The Daily Mirror did an amiable
whole page interview with me (26/11/70).

The press in 1970 had not yet been fired with
the zealotry shown nowadays in the
persecution of artists.

In 1970 I was performing with the The People
Show, for whom I had negotiated their first
Arts Council revenue grant. This gave the
press the chance to - inaccurately - pin the
blame on the luckless Arts Council Drama
Department. Peter Bird, at that time a visual
art officer, gave the Daily Express the
following interesting statement:
"Mr Miller belongs to an organisation called
'The People's Show' (sic) which tours the
country and carries out experimental drama
to bring the theatre to the people. For this they
get a grant from the Arts Council. But what
they were doing in Leeds was in no way
connected with this. He gets a grant to carry
out 'environmental sculpture and art' for the

'People's Show', but not for private
happenings in the streets of Leeds."

THE DEFENCE

Barrington Black, our defence solicitor,
claimed defiantly that:
"If they did, (offend anybody) they apologise,
but they don't apologise for conducting
themselves in a way which will improve life,
the environment and the outlook of people in
years to come."

It is interesting that the social application of
public art was recognised 17 years ago, in
spite of the Arts Council's unwillingness to
extend popular theatre to the Leeds streets.

Our intention was to present a work for people
living in the Hunslet flats. Some of the
students also lived there, and, on my advice,
had prepared the residents with advance
warning - fruitlessly, as it turned out. Our
performance piece was in part a comment on
the car-dominated urban environment. A
series of carefully prepared, simultaneous
solo performances ended when we were all
drawn by white bandages into a parked car.
The Guardian saw the point, and called its
piece 'Automotive'. Barrington Black's
defence statement was reminiscent of the
trial in Heinrich Boll's novel 'The End of a
Mission' (1966). 3

Boll's central characters carried out their
'happening', involving the burning of a
Bundeswehr army jeep, as a protest against
the wasteful excesses of militarism. One of
the defence witnesses in the German trial is
Herr Bueren, a Prof essor of Art at a Rhineland
art college. (A reference to Dusseldorf, where
Joseph Beuys taught?).

Buren is asked to define "this new art trend...
or art form now known internationally as a
Happening". He describes "...this art which
called itself anti-art. It was an attempt.. .to
create a liberating disorder, not form but non-
form, non-beauty in fact; but itsdirection was
determined by the artist, or performer,
creating new form out of non-form. In this
sense, the incident in question was 'without
the slightest doubt a work of art"'.

Our Leeds events, which ran for a week, used
several cars. We kissed and threw confetti
over street parked Bentleys, Daimlers and
Rollers, we drove round the Ring Road in a
bloodied and bandaged VW Beetle, with
lumps of meat hanging off it. And we
performed the stylised ritual, accurately
timed, in the courtyard of the Hunslet flats
that caused our arrest. Our performances
were a conscious comment on modern
society, art on the street, where life is lived.

HAPPENINGS

The original ideas behind performance art -
in the 60s - were close to what Boll called 'the
internationally known Happening'. The
happening drew together the infuence of
several different movements - Dada, in the

1920s, and its successor Surrealism
(historical ly dated from 1 924 to 1 969 by Jean
Schuster), and the Situationists in the late
60s.

As a distinct form, the happening is usually
traced to the American influences of Allan
Kaprow (who saw the happening as 'a logical
extension of environments'), with Meredith
Monk, Claes Oldenburg, Robert
Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneeman, and

many others. These artists and dancers
consciously fused different art forms.

John Cage, musician and composer, worked
with Robert Rauschenberg, painter, and
Merce Cunningham, dancer/choreographer,
in England in 1964, when I met them and saw
them working. One of Robert Rauschenberg's
techniques was to scour the environs of the
theatre where they performed, for discarded
materials to use in the decor of each show.
This was analagous to John Cage's use of
'found sounds'. 4

Adrian Henri, in his 1974 book 'Environments
& Happenings' gives a clear account of these
developments, and their influence on British
artists. Ronald Hunt, a Newcastle artist, is
quoted by Adrian Henri from a 1967
exhibition catalogue: in which he says that
'Surrealism shares with Constructivism the
consistent misinterpretation of critics and
historians who see only formal or aesthetic
end-products in a movement which was
aiming at political and social revolution'. 5

The familiar distinction between a 'process'
preferred by some artists, and 'product'
beloved of some critics, most curators and
gallerists, and all dealers, recurs frequently in
discussion of live artwork. At first 'process not
product' was associated with the free creative
philosophy of the 60s, and the subsequent
community art movement. Today the value of
making public art accessible through
exposure of an artist's working processes -
often on site - is recognised by most people.
The existence of a 'product', on a site
prepared diligently by the presence there of a
working artist was not invented by
performance (or community) artists. All
public on-site mural and fresco work is like
this, and the process exposed to public
scrutiny gains in social and political impact.
The presence, or absence, of the artist, is
always important. When the work is finished,
the collective public memory contains the
process observed. Art made in the studio, and
transferred direct to the gallery, thence
perhaps to the private collection, does not
hold this position. There are advantages and
disadvantages in both camps. Performance
art in the late 60s/early 70s was exploring the
value of publicly observed process, some of
its critics could only deplore an absence of
product.

The 'revolutionary' intentions of live art have
been clearly manifested in mainland Europe
from the 20's to the present day. The 60's
student uprisings in France and elsewhere
had a profound cultural and artistic aspect.
The Dutch 'provos' used art events to protest

against their Calvinistic society. The live
street-art performances that Shirley
Cameron and I introduced into Portugal in
1974 were rapidly associated with a real
revolutionary movement to democratise art
with the rest of Portuguese society.

Joseph Beuys, whilst eschewing politics after
he had co-founded, with Heinrich Boll and
others, the Free International University,
from which evolved the West German Green
Party, was constantly in conflict with
establishments of all kinds.
In Poland, in 1981, artists in Lodz supporting
Solidarity organised a constructivist/
surrealist street event, manoeuvring by hand
a huge white cube through the traffic. Much
contemporary Czechoslovakian live art is a
covert exercise in underground resistance.
Some of these examples are recorded in our
exhibition 'The Art That Moves', which was on
tour in England in 1986/87. 6

Many of the American happening/events in
the 60s and 70s were inspired by anti-
militarism. In 1971 artists tried to close the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, and
attacked Wall Street, re-naming it 'War
Street'.

SUBSIDY - A REPRESSIVE
TOLERANCE?

Like many other things British in the last 20
years, the development of performance art
has been determined by money - by subsidy.

Performance or live art has been a source of
anxiety to the cultural establishment, and an
easy diversion for the press, but it has not in
any real sense been a force for political or
social change. Non-art manifestations, like
'Embrace the Base' at Greenham Common,
some of the Greenpeace techniques, and the
activities of the anarchist 'Stop the City' and
animal liberation groups have expressed
political aims with happening-techniques.
But British culture makes a very clear
distinction between art, politics, and crime,
and punishes those that break the rules.

The July/August 1976 edition of Studio
International was devoted to performance,
and carried several articles expressing
attitudes to live art at that time.

Some writers feared the 'inappropriate'
relation between theatre and visual art
inferred by use of the word 'performance'.
Hugh Adams (now Visual Art Officer for
Southern Arts) in a thoughtful keynote
essay/criticised claims that I had made
elsewhere for the democracy of form in
public-place performance work. I had also
written of the possibility of performance
artists overcoming the 'commodity' trap of
the art market. 7

In response, Hugh Adams said these claims
were not only specious, but lacked theoretical
foundation. He quoted appreciatively a
reference to "the visual arts as a whole finding
'their natural placement in those structures
articulating 'commodity exchange". This and
other opinions are attributed by Hugh Adams

to Stuart Brisley (then and now a lecturer at
the Slade School of Fine Art), who as long ago
as 1976 was articulating, with Leslie Haslam,
a theory of 'Anti Performance Art'. 8

In another article, Richard Francis (now in
charge of Liverpool's 'Tate of the North')
described the problems caused by the
precedent set by the Arts Council's Art
Department. The newly-formed Performance
Art Committee (1974/75/76) had
committed to its funds to paying artists an
annual revenue grant so that they might be
free to produce work 'continuously'.

"This. ..caused resentment amongst painters
and sculptors, one of whom complained that
it was 'easier to get money by standing on a
street corner and playing a banjo' than by
painting." 9

a desire to preserve the status quo that forced
the Arts Council to abandon revenue funding
for performance artists. In 1986 the
Gulbenkian Foundation's suppressed
investigation into the finances of visual artists
finally emerged into half-light nearly 10 years
after inception." One thing it made clear was
the vested interest of well-established artists
- often London-based - in the then Arts
Council system of subsidy by one-off awards
and exhibition opportunities. The notion of
paying an artist for continuous work on art
was not liked by the older art establishment,
who wished to preserve the links between
commercial galleries, sales, and publicly
funded exhibitions. It had also been a long-
established tradition that practising artists
really earned their living from teaching in art
schools.

was involved then both with the
Performance Art Committee and an artists'
collective based in Nottingham. What we
were asking for was parity with artists and
groups funded by the Arts Council's
Experimental Drama and Community Art
Committees, whose funding was based on an
agreed Equity minimum. Equity is a trade
union, and of course we were looking for a
professional recognition for all working
artists, irrespective of discipline. 10

I don't think it was a question of money, more

Now that part-time art school teaching has
disappeared, and the tide is running in favour
of artists' exhibition payments as a right
(EPR), the scene has changed. Artists of all
disciplines are occasionally able to work in
residencies and (thanks to Artists Placement
Group) placements, at reasonable rates of
pay, calculated on an annual basis. Public art
commissions now often include time for paid
work on site. Unfortunately - in the envious
eighties - the political times are not
propitious, nevertheless the battlefield on
which that 70s performance art debate was

sited should be re-examined.

INTO THE ENVIOUS EIGHTIES

A new element in funding is the introduction
of the Performance Art Promoters scheme
(PAP) by the Arts Council.

Running now for 5 years, PAP is a very 80s
thing. It relies on the existence of quasi-
autonomous non-statutory agencies. Like the
public art agencies that have also sprung up
recently, these promoters are often small
concerns, dominated by one or two
individuals. They receive funding directly
from Arts Council and/or Regional Arts
Association sources. PAP initially funded 3,
and currently 4 main promoters, of whom 2 or
3 are building-based. The promoters are not
publicly accountable, nor are they (yet)
regulated by set terms or standard contracts.
Choice of which performance artists are
subsidised, which not. has been handed over
by the Arts Council to a very few individuals.
The Arts Council's own monitoring group is
small, and not geographically representative,
its role is unclear. Typically, the PAP scheme
was set up without consultation of artists.

One of the criticisms made by Richard
Francis (op cit) in 1976 was that:
"(performance artists were) making work
which fitted the established funding pattern
rather than pursuing an original intention."
Another general criticism from fine artists
within the Arts Council was that performance

art was too theatrical. The situation today,
under PAP, is more, not less like this.
Performance art opportunities have been
reduced to the level of 'open' competitions, in
which selection is made by self-interested
individuals. A mixture of public competition
and direct commissioning makes it possible
for individual promoters to closely control
what work is funded, whilst appearing to
throw the process open. There is no longer
any debate about the development of new
work. No reasons are given for rejection. Even
the (competition) rules can be changed
halfway through the process. 12

The Arts Council, and the Regional Arts
Associations, have abandoned their
responsibility for live art. Much of the funding
in the last three years has been spent on
packages of repeated performances, touring
the country with identical work. The site-
specific nature of live art, its immediacy,
improvisation, and sense of 'process' are
missing. Very little new work can develop
outside the circle of established artists who
have found favour with the Promoters' group.

In the 80s, the habitual anxiety of official
cultural agencies at the prospect of anarchy
or disorder has been expressed as a
conscious attempt to raise the profile of
performance, by hyping it as a sophisticated
form of alternative theatre. By linking
performance to Dromntion. live art has been
pushed into the gap between public and
artist The Door art, the art that uses
discarded materials and abandoned

locations, without the sophistication of ticket
sales, or stylish publicity, is still closer to the
reality of the "happening' that seeks to
intervene in real life situations.

UNOFFICIAL WORK

The following performance piece was
produced in Sheffield at Easter 1987, by
Sarah Morrell. It was subsequently rejected
by the sole selector of the 'National Review of
Live Art' (Riverside, London, October 1987)-
which is regarded as the main showcase for
new live art in the UK. Clearly a performance
as site (and date) specific as this cannot be
accommodated into a packaged system of
promotional touring work, especially when
selection is in the hands of a single individual,
who must travel the country and see
everything in a series of 'mini-platform
events'.

This previously unpublished account is as I
wrote it at the time. Sarah Morrell's second
major event in an empty Sheffield factory -
The Holy Ghost Train took place on Easter
Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights. The
building she uses is next to the River Don. just
off the city centre. The gantries, piping,
sumps and open hearth still in place in the big
shed, were all used in this rambling, vigorous
event that featured members of Swamp
Circus. Zof . and 'you' - the audience. .

Divided into Acts, signified by projected titles,
the event also used amplified music, film,
smoke, and theatre lighting.

The audience drifted into the front end of the
factory, to see a series of old 16mm films,
hand-coloured and drawn on, which were
screened throughout, high up above a red-
robed drumming band. Various figures stood
around, some up near the roof, others at floor
level. At the back of the space a fire burned in
a hearth, and in a small lamp-lit stall, the
skeleton of a horse lay on straw. Broken
windows looked out on the waters of the River
Don. There were assemblages of junk, a set of
wooden organ pipes, and a tall monument
made of wheels, circuit boards and TV sets.
Hanging fom the roof, a collection of the
detritus of society- a dummy arm, a doll, a toy
donkey, machine parts, plastic piping, and a
sack that was gashed with a hook to let sand
sift out of it, falling through a spotlight.

In one corner a polythene shack was used for
mid-performance costume changes. From
the roof of this shack, a giant translucent
figure was hauled upright.

This arena seemed to be filled with
performers, some operating independently
as though in an anarchic Robert Wilson
opera. Five men and women dressed
formally, marched, ran, and tumbled back
and forth, in ranks and singly.

There were voices, the words barely
distinguishable. The main sounds were
drumming. A white sheet was drawn back to
reveal a stylish couple sitting in a white pit,
breakfasting with The Independent and their
loud Yuppy neuroses. This section was
revealed and covered many times over, the
white sheet being pulled back and forth by an
operative. There were a lot of operatives in
The Holy Ghost Train, members of the
companies whose job was to animate the
hardware, let off the smoke, bang the gongs.

One of their more difficult tasks was to roll a
concrete sphere, black and round, about the
floor. This sphere, head high, was at first
covered with newspapers which burst into
flame. Flames also appeared on the wire cage
that surrounded two unicyclists wearing
kitchen foil bikinis.

The entry of the unicyclists marked the
pantomimic section of the event. The first
half illuminated the factory's built-in
features, the 'glamour' of the machinery, the
black grease, the echoes and crashes, the
dangers and sheer scale of the place, and
the figures marching and running through it
all. The later sections tried to form a story,
possibly an allegory.

A May Queen entered, encased in plastic,
walking on gondola -boots, armed with a
green water pistol. She picked up some of the
Yuppy couple's dialogue, stocks and shares,
heavy finance, banking. She was either
pursued by or commanded a troop of wild
creatures, also armed with water. They were
addressed as 'ancestors'. This Lewis Carroll-
ish creation, with her screeching voice and
bullying manner could be Margaret Thatcher
- but then so could any strident monster
these days.

'Holy Ghost Train' Sarah Worrell, photographed
from video.

The May Queen was followed by a minion
covered in plastic pipes, wearing a Japanese
fencer's mask, this minion walked on air
boots, so that each step produced a musical
note. After much tooing and froing the May
Queen was toppled, laid down on a hospital
trolley, which was poled like a gondola
through the smoke. She was then placed
screaming on the monument of wheels, in an
approximation to a crucifixion.

That should have been that, except that there
was an obligatory audience participation
section. In one of the few clearly audible
voices of the evening we were told in no
uncertain terms that we had to find several
pieces of a wooden carving, a tree in a pot,
and some other things. These we had to place
by the concrete sphere. If you got it wrong,
picked up the wrong thing, you get told off. An
operative passed amongst us with an
impossibly large 'chalice' asking for our spit
to water the tree.

When everything was in place - operatives
helping the audience to complete their tasks
- a surprising torrent of spit was poured onto
the tree.

The achievement of The Holy Ghost Train

was the animation of the place, the decayed
industrial context, the orchestration of
effects, and the ensemble movements. The
plot seemed unnecessary, and some of the
best visual effects should have been isolated
by silence or darkness. The shadows on a
corrugated iron wall of ragged figures pulling
and pushing at their monstrous concrete
sphere was a superb allegory.

Events like The Holy Ghost Train can set

important precedents. Sheffield has plenty of
other spaces that should be creatively
liberated from their post-industrial decay- so
has every other city in the North. Sarah
Morrell and her Zof performers deserve an
empty factory circuit of their own.

Characteristics of the current set of young
performance artists are a concern for social
activity, foraccessible, technically simple but
striking visual effects, and for communal
music and dance. They are personally
involved in the social environment, the post-
industrial, post-work city.

Performance art continues to be one of the
most exciting and challenging movements in
contemporary art, and it will certainly
overcome the vagaries of fashions in public
spending.

FOOTNOTE: January 1988 - performance art
funding has been returned to the Art
Council's Visual Art Panel, with the closure of
the Combined Arts Department, which setup
the Performance Art Promoters' scheme
(PAP). Meanwhile, Sarah Morrell's most
recent project, for an industrial wasteland in
Sheffield, has been short-listed by the
Gulbenkian Foundation for one of its Large
Scale Project Awards. Maybe there is some
justice up there after all!

NOTES:

1 . For a full account of both 'motor car images' and
the earlier 'railway images', see an article by
Roland Miller, New Theatre Magazine. Bristol
vol XI No. 1, 1971.

2. The 'Photo-News' feature in the Daily Express
( 15/ 10/70) described 'railway images' - a four-
day event beside the Leeds-Wakefield railway
line. See also: 'Arts Bulletin* No. 3. Winter 197 1,
on Experimental Projects, published by the Arts
Council. Article by Lord Feversham.

3. Heinrich Boll. The End of a Mission. Germany
1966; pub. Penguin Books tr. 1973.

4. For an account of the Cage/Rauschenberg visit
to England. 1964. see article by Roland Miller.
New Theatre Magazine. Bristol. 1964 vol V4.

5. Environments & Happenings, by Adrian Henri,
pub. Thames & Hudson. 1974.

6. 'The Art That Moves', exhibition of documents
of live art from the 60s to the present, by Shirley
Cameron & Roland Miller. Organised by
Huddersfield Art Gallery, 1986. Catalogue
available from the authors. 49 Stainton Rd
Sheffield SI 1 7AX.

7. Roland Miller's statement on performance art
first published in the programme for the
Birmingham International Performance Art
Festival, 1974. subsequently reprinted
elsewhere.

8. 'Against a Definitive Statement on British
Performance Art' by Hugh Adams, appeared in
Studio International. Vol. 192. No 982 July/
August 1976.

9 .'Performance and Arts Council Patronage' by
Richard Francis also appeared in Studio
International, op cit.

10. Stuart Brisley & Lesley Haslam. Statement,
catalogue of the Milan exhibition 'Arte Inglese
Oggi' 1960-76 London 1976. The catalogue
also contained statements by Shirley Cameron,
Roland Miller, and other artists, together with
photographs of work.

11. Report on the 'Financial Status of the Visual
Artist) unpublished, commissioned by the
Gulbenkian Foundation, with research by
Andrew Brighton and Dr Nich Pearson.

12. Projects UK, Newcastle, the main promoting
agency for live art in the UK failed to select any
of the projects submitted - in 'open'
competition in summer 1987. Applicants were
advised to re-apply in February '88. when new
criteria would be set. Neither the indentity of
the selectors nor individual reasons for
rejecting existing projects were given. Artists
are expected to prepare detailed budgets, and
give full accounts of their proposals - twice
over! and at their own expense.

PROJECTS U.K.

PROJECTS U.K., based in Newcastle, are Britain's most prolific
promoters of live art. Alex Fulton speaks to its two co-
organisers John Bewley and Simon Herbert.

ALEX FULTON Could you say a little about
the history of Projects U.K.?

JON BEWLEY There was a predecessor to
Projects U.K. which was called the Basement
Group, which was formed in December 1979.
This was, basically, a basement space, which
was administered by six artists. The overall
aim of the Basement was to provide a space
for the presentation of experimental work at a
time when the support structure for this type
of activity was virtually non-existent. Our
funding was relatively low - artists received
expenses and a nominal fee.

A.F. Nevertheless, you programmed over
450 events, and the list of artists you dealt
with reads like a complete 'Who's Who' of
time-based artists, including 'big' names
such as Stuart Brisley and Bruce Mclean.
How do you account for this?

J.B. Well, as I've already indicated, there
were an awful lot of artists out there
wanting to produce work in performance,
video, film and installation, and nowhere to
go to with their work. We were also
operating politically within a geographical
context; we wanted to gradually foster the
idea that there was an alternative to
London and the South. By starting from
scratch it took a while to create a 'history'
for the practice, but by being out of the
centre of the cultural market we found a
surprising openess to what we were doing,
not least from our funding body Northern
Arts. Artists like Brisley could identify
politically with such an initiative, and were
therefore more than willing to produce
work.

A.F. In 1984 the Basement changed into
Projects U.K. What were the reasons
behind that?

J.B. After five years of doing two
performances a week, bar Christmas and
some of Summer, we were pretty tired. The
original six Basement members were all
practising artists - we were touring our
work as a group - and there didn't seem to
be enough hours in the day. Also, we felt
that we had taken the Basement as far as it
could go; we were operating an open-
access policy of literally first come first
served, which placed us firmly in the role
of responders with the prospect of a non-
flexible two-year rolling programme. So the
Basement disbanded, and Ken Gill and
myself formed Projects U.K., an
organisation operating purely from an

office. We had a telephone, limited
programme monies, good grass-root links
with other artists and organisation at home
and abroad, and a lot of enthusiasm. After
our experiences of running the Basement
we had two initial aims: to encourage the
presentation of live art outside of the 'art
space' (which the Basement, to a certain
extent, had become) and draw in a
potentially larger audience, and - most
importantly - to allow artists access to
alternate methods of production,
presentation and distribution.

A.F. What were the kind of difficulties you
had in promoting live work to audiences
who were unfamiliar with the medium?

J.B. I think that you have to credit people
with more intelligence than to presume
that they will be dismissive to something
they are unfamiliar with. Looking back it all
seemed very easy, which it wasn't, but you
select an artist and a venue that are
compatible, publicize it, and off you go.
Richard Layzell had over 400 people see
him at a night-club, Silvia Ziranek
performed at Pizzaland, Charlie Hooker
created a ballet for cars at a multi-storey
car-park, Bruce Mclean worked with
synchronised swimmers at the local
swimming pool. People became used to
these events, and kept an eye out for them.

SIMON HERBEBT The other thing to bear in
mind is the support-structure that you

provide for an artist. For example, you don't
programme an artist who walks around
slowly with a bucket on his head in a night-
club full of 400 pissed Geordies.

J.B. There should always be a reason for
programming work other than 'wouldn't
that be fun?" As way of example, in 1984
we organised the Touring Exhibitionists, in
which ten artists toured and presented
short works in six cities - Brighton. London,
Bristol. Rochdale. Nottingham and
Newcastle - over seven days. The project
mixed a wide cross-section of performance
activities, ranging from the considered
work of Alistair MacLennan to the controlled
anarchy of the French artist Joel Hubaut.
As a whole, it was designed to establish a
series of geographical links and visibility
for the practice.

Nan Hoover at the Basement, 1982. Photo: Steve Collins. e Projects U.K.

c

8>

c->

a?

e

s

11

c

f;

^^•*- o*

o

*S

ll

o •

m%W -.Ammm

o

M (/>

£

r 2

£

'f

HI

■ - ^^B

c

■ mi

'C

.b o>

Q> <_)

5 s

^-

S.H. That certainly wasn't fun.
(laughter)

A.F. Performance art has made a bit of a
come-back over the last few years,
appearing regularly at all kinds of venues.
How is Projects U.K. currently promoting
live work?

J.B. For the last four years the Arts Council
have been putting money into the
Franchise Promoters Scheme, run by its
Combined Arts Department. The current
annual budget is £30,000. which is divided
up strategically amongst organisations
around the country. Applications are
annual, and you must have the backing of
your Regional Arts Association. Projects
U.K. has received money each year so far,
and we currently receive a third of the pot.
This money is purely for the promotion of
time-based work. In the first year, we
organised 'New Work. Newcastle '86' in
conjunction with the Laing Art Gallery,
which show-cased the work of thirteen
artists in and around Newcastle.

S.H. Half of these artists were
commissioned using the Franchise monies

to produce new work. In all respect to
them, they were less well-established than
some figures in the field, so the money was
used, in effect, as a 'seeding' source. Up-
and-coming artists presented work
alongside practitioners with established
reputations. The latter were invited.

A.F. What does the selection process for
your commissions involve?

J.B. Invitations for artists to submit
proposals for a commission are advertised
nationally. We run it on an open
submission basis. There is a selection
panel consisting of Simon and myself, Arts
Council representatives, local artists, plus
writers or promoters who have extensive
knowledge of the field. Oh, and one of the
previous year's commissions. Their input is
very valuable, as they went through the
whole process the year before but from a
very different perspective. Applications are
accepted principally on merit; it just so
happens that the last two years' monies
went to younger artists, ifs certainly not a
rule thumb.

A.F. When the Basement turned into

2 » £

Projects U.K. one of its aims was to take
live art out of the gallery format. Both of
your last two festivals were organised in
conjunction with the Laing Art Gallery, and
the second one toured to the Cornerhouse
in Manchester and Cartwright Hall in
Bradford. Isn't there a contradiction here,
in that you are actively promoting work
back within existing institutions?

J.B. I think this really depends on your
viewpoint. There were a number of reasons
why we approached the Laing Art Gallery,
not least of which, to be pragmatic, was
that they are major recipients of Glory of
the Garden monies. We felt that some of
this money, supplemented with our
commission monies and our experience in
promoting time-based work, could do
nothing but benefit the practice as a whole,
both in terms of visibility and opportunities
for artists.

S.H. For years artists have produced work
with no real recognition, and in spaces that
have not been technically or conceptually
equipped to handle them. This was a way
of re-addressing the balance. The Laing
people were a little naive in some ways, but
thafs okay because they were very
enthusiastic and supportive. We handled
the nuts and bolts, and they made use of
their extensive local education contacts
pulling sixth-formers in to see events and
take part in related workshops. Static
shows accompanied both festivals.
Certainly no one held a gun to their head
and forced them to follow such an
initiative.

J.B. Some types of work, though, obviously
cannot physically or conceptually take
place in a gallery. For instance, in the first
festival we invited Alistair Maclennan to
make a long-duration work in a sizeable
space. Galleries cannot operate under a 24
hour open access (the work was 120 hours
continuous) and anyway a gallery space
wasn't right for his particular approach. So
we found a large derelict warehouse for
him and we alternated invigilation over the
five days. Last year we brought Karen
Finley over from America, a highly
controversial artist who deals in very up-
front and harrowing analyses of sexual
violence. The work was poignant whilst
>eing aggressive, and Karen was nude for
some of the time, so we found a controlled
separate venue that she felt comfortable
with. But to address your question more
closely, there is a need, amid the current
fashionability of live work, to analyse
exactly what the end-results are. Over the
last few years we have attempted to set the
ground-work for a greater integration of live
work into the mainstream, but. given the
nature of the medium, this is potentially
every problematic in terms of the demands
being made of the artists. Large institutions
are not very flexible, and chances are they
employ few people who have a sensibility
towards live work - and that ranges all the
way from publicizing the work within an
adequate context through to ensuring that
the equipment is not going to conk out

half-way through a performance.

S.H. In the current climate, up-and-coming
as well as established artists seem to be
increasingly faced with a specific number
of considerations in producing live work
which we aren't happy with, i.e. "o.k., you
can make a work, but we don't want a
mess, the work must be small-scale
enough to be set up, presented and taken
down in two days, it can't cost a lot as ifs
only one day's activities out of 365, and for
God's sake dont' offend anyone." There are
already signs that this thinking is being
engrained in artists' attitudes judging by
some of the applications we receive. That's
not to say such work is not valid, of course,
simply that other places can deal with it,
and we're not particularly interested.

J.B. We've taken a very different stance
with the commissions this year. In
advertising them we've made it very
explicit that we want proposals that
challenge contemporary perceptions of
both form and content. The money is there
for people with ambition who want to push
forward the boundaries. There are artists
out there who can do it, but maybe up until
now they don't think that there's anyone
interested enough to do so amongst the
stampede to jump onto the performance
art band-wagon.

k.T. Is this one of the reasons why you are
increasingly organising works in other
formats?

J.B. We're still committed, obviously, to
live work, which we also promote to schools
and colleges with video and slide
documentation packs, but one of the worst
things that you can do is to adopt a tunnel
vision; the Basement was set up nearly ten
years ago - it was great but it's now in the
past. We programmed Richard Wilson's
'One Piece At A Time' installation in the
Tyne Bridge as part of TSWA 3D, we are
currently commissioning artists' sound-
works for telephone lines, artists' billboard
works for advertising sites and lots of other
projects.

S.H. In times of social repression, as now.
the boundaries are drawn back and
regress. We are an organisation that offers
the chance for artists to contact us if they
want to cross disciplines and practice. To
expand.

J.B. Firstly, because it's interesting, and
secondly because good art is not confined
to a single practice. It never was. And as
long as we continue to operate, we'll try
and make sure it won't be.

■ Projects U.K. are a depart-
ment of Newcastle Media
Workshops.

SCREEN &
PROJECTION

Alistair Dickson

Unlimited Liability: This is a speculative review of several live instllations/
performances recently seen in Glasgow. After describing what was seen in
each performance, it will indulge in the most detested vice of the critic:
theorising after the fact. The artists' only responsibility for this lies in their
having sparked off this line of thought.

ON the evening of 3rd October 1978,
three artists presented works at
Transmission Gallery, utilising the
basement as well as the ground floor outer
and inner galleries.

'Fragments' by Jane Bartlett was

presented in the outer gallery and front
window. Materially, it consisted of several
pairs of shoes constructed from various
materials (cardboard, shoe leather, etc). The
performance element involved the gallery
space being cut in two directions by projector
light beams, one projecting shoes on shoes
and the other pair of legs. Bartlett took her
place in one of the pairs of shoes, trying to
match her own position with that indicated by
the projected legs. There was no dramatic
development, the position just being
maintained for several minutes, after which
the performance was over.

For Louise Crawford's 'Marilyn: Modern
Icon', the inner gallery had been hung in
depth with advertising-hoarding sized
images of Marilyn Monroe, behind large
polythene drapes. To a record of sacred
music by Bach and a banal song by Monroe
herself, Crawford moved within the space,
painting and washing the images, which
gradually tore away to reveal American flag
images beneath. At the end of the
performance, she encouraged the audience
to move behind the screen, to where a shrine
(candle and crucifix) to the idolisation of
Monroe had been set up.

The third performance of the evening,
Sabine Buerger's 'A Prayer for England'

took place in the basement, where three
enormous 'paper boats' had been
constructed from papier mache. Two of the
boats were filled with water and one of them
pulled across the floor, while a tape repeated
"...and, a boat.. .and, a boat" with various
inflections. The final segment involved
Buerger obeying the imperative in the
programme notes: "Carry the empty ship on
your head. Who will listen to my scream?", a
catharsis with perhaps greater significance
for the performer than the audience.

While the Tranmission Gallery space was fully
utilised by the three performances, it is a pity
that they took place in series, with the
audience reduced to a kind of tourism,
moving from one spectacle to another.
Despite the performers having previously
worked together, during artists' residencies
at Battersea in London, inter-reaction
between the evening's individual
performances was missing. However,
common elements of vocabulary appeared to
be present, arising from shared experience;
this will be explored later.

'Seduction/ Saturation' by Karen Strang/
Limited Space, presented thre? weeks later
at the Third Eye Centre (as part of the New
Work/ No Definition season), again utilised
projected images. Strang sat at a table,
readingaloud froma Mills & Boon paperback,
flanked by sequences of video images to one
side and slide images to the other. Each
showed a projection of Dr. David Owen's face,
distorted by her body. The limit to the depth of
the performance space was defined by
hanging frames, which contained clingfilm
instead of canvas. The performance lasted 30
minutes (this being the length of the tape of a

ticking clock which could be heard in the
background) and was framed by the
scattering of rose petals at the beginning and
the cutting-away of the clingfilm at the end.

Because a cold had obliterated Strang's
voice, the second night's performance
(hereafter Seduction/Saturation II) was
very different. Of the reading, only the traces
survived (on tape), and her actual role in the
performance was a retreat into muteness,
silently reading her book while Pete Horobin
and Ken Murphy-Roud intermittently
destroyed the screens and ceiling-hangings
(and eventually the book itself). In this
version, the performance space had been
deepened and the original time structure
survived only as the spacing between the
events (the outbreaks of violence); each
element heightened the tension of the other.

Consideration and comparison of these
installations and performances bring to mind
two main subjects: those of the performance
spacing, the screen projection, and the
subject matter.

The performance spacing exists both as
location and time slice. Does performance
aspire to the state of theatre? What would
make the experience of witnessing a
performance satisfactory?

In its location, a performance has the
immediate 'choice' between situation inside
or outside a gallery. In saying that, the idea of
choice has been bracketed because it is
largely an of the social structure. In the

first place, a gallery can be the location for
irrelevant activities, or a 'haven in a heartless
world' in times of reflux; activity outside a
gallery can forge new and exciting links, or be
as irrelevant as Saturday robot dancing or
SPGB soapboxing. Secondly, there is the
question of the institutional recognition of the
type of activity: the current attraction of
performance work in Scotland may well be
influenced partly by the tenuous grasp on the
subject by the Scottish Arts Council and most
other administrators, partly by the implicit
refusal of commodification in producing one-
off works which are totally unsaleable
(although a trade in 'documentation' detritus
is a danger).

So each situation has to be judged on its
merits. That said, if a gallery space is chosen,
the nature of the installation largely
determines the relationship between the
performer's space and the audience's space.

In Louise Crawford's performance, the
demarcation between these respective areas
was immediately obvious, leading to
problems when the boundaries had to be
'transgressed' at the end of the piece. On the
otherv hand, although a virtual space was
created by the projector beams, Jane
Bartlett's tableau vivant was perceived as
establishing no boundaries, existing within
the normal gallery space. A Prayer for
England utilised a space in which the
audience was quite literally marginalised. In

Seduction/Saturation I the boundary was
quite rigid, whereas much that was exciting
about Seduction/ Saturation II came from
its insistent violation of the audience's space;
the uncertainties created by overflowing of
the acts of violence into what had initially
appeared to be the audience's space.

As time-based works, performances veer
between minimal activity in a duration
outside clock time (which can itself be read
as either a refusal of the standardised time of
the economic system, or as a celebration of
the repitition at its heart) and a theatrical
duration.

The former is only really effective when the
(non)action is maintained for a very long
time, straining audience patience; the latter
gives a work a much more familiar shape.
The short duration of Fragments generated
confused audience reactions, while the
conventionally dramatic time-forms of
Marilyn: Modern Icon and Seduction/
Saturation I drew strength from the latter
aspect.

Running through the performances was the
thread of a common vocabulary. Light
projection, sometimes occluded by
transmission through 'clear' media, and
screen images were placed and manipulated
in a variety of ways. The perception of the
subject matter, although a separate subject,
blended closely with this technical aspect.

What is the role of the projection onto the self?
What is the role of the idealised image? A
common point between the performances
was this ambivalent attitude to the imaginary
image, that ideal projection of the self which
is simultaneously a socialised self, a
socialisation of the self, a self -as-other; above
all, an attempt to fill a perceived lack, but one
which remains insubstantial and is never to
be realised. The impossibility of meeting all
these criteria is typified in the fate of Marilyn
Monroe.

That highlights the necessity to gender this
ambivalence, not least because all these
performances were by women. None was far
from dealing with the ambivalence of the

woman's historic role as object of fascination,
destined to be ideal object to another's
subject - the path between subjection and
subjecthood.

Structurally, projection presents two
positions: the viewer and the viewed. In its
use on these performances, the positions
were multiplied and complicated: the
audience viewed the performer as she viewed
the projection. "Blurring the boundaries and
feeding the ambiguities between the real and
the simulated" as the programme notes for
Fragments described the process. In the
case of Seduction/Saturation, the
performer's acted retreat into romantic
fiction was reflected in the relentless desire of
her video image 'selfs' to coincide with the
romantic ideal; in its second performance,
the search for the impetuous romantic ideal
man was driven by a desire for passive
escape from an impetuous and violent actual
man.

One final aspect which can aspect which can
be mentioned is the role of the programme
notes in carrying a meaning of the
performance. The notes vary from the purely
descriptive (such as those for Marilyn:
Modern Icon and Seduction/Saturation) to
those which carry at least as much weight as
the performance itself (such as those for
Fragment), to those which appear to reject
any public meaning (as was the case with a A
Prayer for England). Unless the visual is to
be privileged over the written, there would
seem to be no reason why such notes should
not be considered as an important part of the
performance material.

THE FOLLOWING statements were provided by the artists after reading a
copy of the previous piece 'Screen and Projection'. Whilst the author of the
aforementioned admits to indulging in the "most detested vice of the critic,
theorising after the fact", the artists felt that there was an imbalance in his
critical distance regarding the four performances dealt with in the article,
but also some mistakes in his factual obervation. This, however, serves the
positive end of raising some questions about the nature of some
performance work and the problems which arise through written
interpretation.

ART

FRAGMENTS

THIS CONSISTED of three tableaux using
projection in the outer gallery, and a
simulated 'shop window' display of the
objects used; her shoe and shirt 'RE-
designs' - constructed from cardboard,
paper, fabric etc., and parts of existing
shoes and shirts - in the gallery window.

Inside slides of the shoe 'design' were
projected on the two side walls; one small
projection on the skirting; and another at
eye level projected onto a black and white
photocopy of the same shoe, the overlaying
and layering of images attempting to give
some sort of holographic effect. So, you
have the shoes and shirts as 'displays'; as
narrative; as picture; and finally, 'modelled'
a person, here the artist, stands for several
minutes in a pose affecting the wearing of
the shoe 'designs', slides of legs projected
onto her legs. Again the overlaying servingb
the purpose in that it allows the interdeter-
minancy; a 'live fashion plate'.

Jane Bartlett.

Fragments': Jan« Bartlett.

MARILYN: MODERN ICON

IN A dimly lit space, three large
photocopied images of Marilyn Monroe
(taken and enlarged from postcards) were
presented. In front of each one of these
was suspended a polythene sheet, serving
to create a private space - distanced and
separated from the audience - in which the
artist could perform, worship and idolise
the icon.

3 IMAGES 3 ACTIONS 3 CROSSES

As the artists performed her actions took in
religious significance.

1 THE PRESENTATION FOR DEATH

"for when a legend perishes, the cult of myth
can blossom..."

To a quietly played Bach recitl the artist;
applied make up to the first image (making
reference to Andy Warhol's screen printed
'Marilyn'?)

washed/cleansed the image - and
then her own face (identification?)

tore out the wet photocopied image.

2 DEATH

"...to transcend beyond the weakness of the
normal flesh..."

A painted American flag (reference to
Jasper Johns) was ripped from the heart of
the next image (to the additional sound of
Marilyn singing 'I'm thin with love'*) and
buried in a mound of earth below.

"...death feeds the myth and frees the
legend to be reborn solely through
representation..."

3 THE RESURRECTION

"...the representation becomes the
reality..."

The artist carried three large crosses,
plastic fruit and flowers through to the
back of the space to adorn the image - the
'real' Marilyn.

All quotes taken from 'Death and Glory' City
Limits.

Bruce Conner used this soundtrack in his
1975 film 'Marilyn Turns Five'.

Louise Crawford

WATERSHIPS CANT CARRY WATER. PAST IS
THE GLORY. CARRY THE EMPTY SHIP ON
YOUR HEAD.

WHO WILL LISTEN TO MY SCREAM.

A PRAYER FOR ENGLAND, by Sabine
Buerger, with sound by G. Salentin.

THE PERFORMANCE took place in the
basement of Transmission. People were
compressed in the narrow space. A tape
repeating with my voice (joyfully) "...a ship
and a ship and..." and so on. Three huge
paper ships and the blown-up face of
Maggie Thatcher as poster, the sink, and
myself standing at the wall. The audience

PERFORMANCE

in the middle of it, everywhere; useful was
the churchbench, found in the space.
People could sit on it.

I start the destruction of two paperships by
filling these with water. They leak. I pull the
ships through the space, first the dry, the
empty one. An iron bucket underneath
changes a paper-grey ship into an iron-grey
ship. Then the two waterships who can
hardly move. After the action has been
carried out, slowly and with concentration,
they stand in one row; the navy pointing at
me.

Change of sound, light goes out, I stand in
a slide-projection of myself with bound
legs, hands lifted in adoration. Turning
round I am writing into the projection 'a
ship & a ship & a ship...' and so on,
covering the whole projection field. The
writing is fast and brutal. In the following I
sit down, put the paper ship onto my head.
Another tape, my voice speaking "If it were
silent I would scream, if you were listening
I could get rid of my scream" dictates my
action. I speak with the tape; I scream,
gurgle, spit out the words, I try to articulate
myself. If not speaking I am gesturing with
my arms, sitting underneath the ship. The
action is emotional, desperate, and ends
with my complete exhaustion. Throwing off
the ship I leave the room. The audience
remains in darkness.

'A Prayer For England' performance by Sabine
Burger at Transmission. Photo: Peter Horobin.

• •

William
Clark

The Audio-Visual Experimental Festival, held annually in the
town of Arnhem in Holland was instigated by a small group of
students 3 years ago with the aim of presenting new work in
audio-visual means from various art schools in the
Netherlands. The festival quickly developed in scope and
intention and this year 9 countries were represented in over 8
different venues. Run by about 60 volunteers, the festival
maintains an atmosphere conducive to contact and
developing experimentation. As the November issue of
Mediamatics put it: "AVE's main objective is the presentation
of some unknown art and not the attempted detection of
potential celebrities."

MOST events at "AVE 87" tended to
centre around the Filmhuis which
contained two halls which hosted
continuous screenings of video, Super 8 and
16mm work. The foyer art-space of the film-
house was given over each day to as many as
6 or 7 different video installations, slide
arrangements, and performances. The rapid
turnover was enabled by hardworking
technical assistants, mostly artists, who
maintained the continuity with enthusiasm
and technical adaptability. Some of the
installations were impressive and elaborate:
arriving from Scotland on the second day of
the festival, we saw the work of Spanish artist
Fernandez Suarez Cabeza being
assembled to form an installation which
combined sound and video work with
multiple slide projections, sequenced to
reflect and refract their light with a revolving
and partly mirrored glass onto the spectators.

On many occasions the film halls were given
over to lectures. The most informative and
best illustrated of these was given by Wim
Van Der Plas on Computer Animation.
Remaining friendly and informative
throughout, he pointed out that although
computer facilities are fast advancing in
rendering convincing artistic techniques,
almost all the work is being done by 'technical
people' (i.e. not artists). Similarly, since
computer time can cost around £5000 per
second, images tend to be used by corporate
giants to advertise their products.

The sheer volume of single screen video work
made it impossible to view everything, and
anything commented upon must be
erratically selected. Work tended to be shown
grouped by nationality. The work of Raul
Rodriguez discovered an exotic quality in
daily life, and outshone most of the other
Spanish videos. Rodriguez's feel for the
qualities of light and atmosphere of an arid
agrarian cultural landscape conveyed a
sense of documentary and emotion. One
scene, a tracking shot at ground level of an
old peasant woman walking endlessly over
the rocky terrain of her home is particularly
memorable.

Unfortunately, I seemed to have missed the
bulk of the English videos and catch bad
examples when I was in attendance. An
exception was Carol Lynn's short and
poignant 'Megallanic Clouds'. One part of this
video featured swaying colours which in
stages of clarification revealed themselves to
be the most brutal scenes from a slaughter-
house. This work contained a powerful sense
of putting aside effects to reveal a harsh, but
hidden, reality; it handled very well material
normally used gratuitously.

In retrospect the German films, particularly
those from Berlin, were the most impressive,
being more expansive and 'professional'.
Frank Behnke's 'Feitico' was adapted from a
William Burroughs short story with music
from Terminated Alien and This Heat, and
demonstrated an outstanding grasp of his

Hans Jurg Gilgen. music performance at AVE '87. Photo: Chrysta van Kolfschoten

Puberty Institution 'Antehyperaesthesia'. AVE '87'. Photo ? Variant.

material and how to translate it into film.

PERFORMANCE

The film theatre was the venue for Berlin's
Tempel der Freiheit who performed'
"Bolero Babylon", a cacophonic, shambling,
musical deconstruction of order, chance and
chaos, overlayed with projected images of
political troublemakers, from Beuys to
Luxemburg. Later in the evening Huns Jurg
Gilgen - a Swiss - animated various
contraptions to create Cage-like musical
nonsense. This seemed to be taken too
seriously by the performer at the expense of
the true magic and daring of free
improvisation. It did, however, provide an
oblique form of 'entertainment' as he
proceeded to elicit noises from an
assortment of rubber bands, goldfish bowls,
biscuit tins and turntables.

A short distance from the Filmhuis is the
Oceaan. a squatted art space which proved to
be extremely flexible and provided an
invaluable addition to the festival. The
Oceaan seemed more suited to the more
atmospheric performances and installations,
as the Puberty Institution's "Antehyper-
aesthesia" proved. This marked another
collaboration between Craig Richardson and
Douglas Gordon from Glasgow School of Art,
and was an extension of their 'tradition/
debilitation' performance (with Euan
Sutherland) seen at the National Review of
Live Art and at Glasgow's 'New Work/ No
Definition' event. Puberty Institution
presented one of the few works to draw
poetically from the cultural/historical
inscription of the site of Arnhem. A table
spanning rows of coal planted with candles
over the floor of the space was occupied by
two seemingly anaesthetised figures,
wandering slowly, yet held in quiet
desperation. They appeared youthful yet
aged, wearily absorbed and suspended in
painstaking ritual enactments while steeped
in radio static, overlayed with nostalgic music
from the 40s and the evocative timbre of a
lamenting Scottish pibroch.

The Oceaan also played host to the Belgian
artist Trudo Engels who used several
collaborators, seated at microphones beside
tall columns upon which swung lightbulbson
long flexes a short distance from their heads.
The performers' quiet rhythmic murmurs,
combined with the revolving bulbs, were
intermittently amplified and illuminated from
a mixing console leaving starkly powerful
trails and echoes in the darkened space.

Another artist-run space, The Hooghuis was
another venue for the festival and contained
the work of Markus Ambach, German, and
Odine de Kroon. Dutch. In the darkened
basement, Ambach projected film loops
through slits, stencilling the light onto banked
corner pieces creating minimal kinetic
sculptures. In the contrastingly light and
open space upstairs, de Kroon had positioned
a cruciform audio-visual installation into
which the spectator entered, being baptised
with the sound of rushing waterand images of
gently unfurling scroll-like paper.

The Gementmuseum was perhaps the most
challenging space to deal with. Hanneke
Raybroeck tackled the problematic nature
of the space by presenting an installation/
performance which was indistinguishable
from the Museum's cafe. This piece was
centred on 'representing' the afternoon ritual
coffee break of Dutch 'housewives'.
Raybroeck had constructed furniture, some
of which was inset with display cases, video
monitors, mirros and small cibachrome
images. An overall soundtrack provided a
range of sounds from babies crying to the
sound of coffee cups 'clinking'. Raybroeck
herself served coffee to spectators,
mimicking the role of a waitress contributing
to the work's overall tone, incongruous in its
banality, of mocking, of satirising' the mores
of the older generation. Her critical
perception of her subject matter seemed to
have steered her into a role of merchandising
herself/her art on the same level as the sale
of a cup of coffee.

Trudo Engels' performance at 'AVE '87'. Photo: Chrysta van Kolfschoten.

Entering into the language of the prosperous
bourgeoisie was tackled a little differently by
Linda Pollack, also from Holland, with her
performance in the Filmhuis "Susan Smith is
a Business Woman". Pollack, dressed in a
grey business woman's suit, started by
irritating an already surly audience with
taped business deals and a video of an
American game show, whilst strutting briskly
round the hall distributing American Express
leaflets while wildly proclaiming that she
"accepted it". Further exhortations came
from her to play the game we were watching
on T.V., the answer to the question being
'State of Emergency': this seemed a very
slight ending to the proceedings. Curiously,
her use of images of slick consumerism and
marketing techniques seemed to be aimed at
the audience to elicit some type of response,
a provoked reaction which just nearly worked,
yet her pretence of being 'in character' asked
us to suspend our disbelief. This combination
seemed as much conditioned by the virtual
reality of T.V. as any part of her subject
matter. To what extent Raybroeck, Pollack
and the less effective Swedish Paperpool
(Stephan Karlson and Mata Olsson, who
pretended to be representatives of an
imaginary bureaucratic company)
challenged the authority of their subject
matter and engendered a critical awareness
within the spectator poses certain questions
on the authorship of their content. The
fascination with the many faces of affluence
seems at time to conspire into a crypto-
alliance or even pantomime.

The consternation amongst those trying to
raise issues of sexuality away from a fixation
on the female as a passive sexual object was
added to in Galina Voronel Aas' video
installation 'Growing Blue'. This was a six
monitorred wall draped in silk-like cloth and
surrounded by gently billowing cloth
hangings of various sizes. These surrounding
hangings and the videos shared the imagery
of a naked woman in various reclining poses
caressing herself. Although essential, the
multiple repitition of a lone figure bathed in
blue light and soft music did give the foyer the
cold aura of an artistic sex shop. Nudity (for
the hell of it) has always abounded in
performance since the days of Yves Klien -
later in the evening Marcel Nljmeijer with
'An Interaction with a Monitor and a
Prostitute', presented us with an attractive
girl dressed in see-through silk underwear,
provocatively facing the audience, with
pouting lips and whip in hand whilst a video
monitor relayed images of her face. The girl
(and audience) seemed extremely uneasy
about the whole affair, which itself resided
between embarrasment and titiliation. In
putting this work together, Nijmeijer seemed
to have used the girl as little more than an
object of humiliation for the consumption of
the unusually large audience.

An attempt to regain some element of control
over authorship yet still deal with stereotypes,
was present in Hattie Naylor's performance
'Cowboys'. Returning to the overtly direct
format of storytelling, she read a monologue

Photo Chrysta van Kolfschoten
revolving around little boys' fascination with
guns. Her portrayal of the media revealed it as
the lowest common denominator of
stereotyped attitudes, stood up as less of a
fiction, less rhetorically dramatic than mere
mimicking.

The crossover ground between 'experimental
theatre' and performance and the creative
interface which is evolving was demonstrated
uniquely by Piotr Nathan and Elena
Horme's 'a very long and unbelievably
boring piece'. This was an elaborate and
multi-facetted performance, intensely driven
by some peculiar inner logic and schematic
plan. Seemingly endless, it ranged over
changes of costume, atmosphere and
activity, paralleling and reversing stages in
the life of the male or female protagonists
involved. At one point, Nathan and Home
engaged in a Duchamp-like transcription of
awkward sexual activity; balancing a veiled
window frame between their legs while
spraying one another with aerosols, folding
up pages from a pornographic magazine into

paper aeroplanes and aiming them at the
audience. The performance utilised a
multitude of accessories which included a
saxophone, mirrors, suitcases, a ladder, and
various personal effects and artifacts which
formed a mutant portable interior, the setting
of absurdly cruel translations of the banal
processes of life.

In conclusion, with a festival representing
such a vast amount of work, the problem for
both the audience and the organisers is
simply finding the good and challening work.
Next year a stricter selection procedure will
be implemented. This might go some way in
avoiding the over-representation of some
English work, mostly all selected from
Newcastle Polytechnic and Slade School of
Art, some of which was of little substance.
Scotland, in facing the opposite problem of
under-representation, perhaps inspired the
very few that were there to organise a larger
Scottish contigent next year.

VIDEO:

DOCUMENTATION

N

INSTALLATION

A T T H E

NATIONAL
REVIEW

LIVE ART

Douglas Aubrey

Video:
Live Art's poor relative

THE National Review itself is an- excellent
event to go to and witness some of the best
and new live work going on in Britain at the
moment - this actually does include video.

Judging by both the profile and the status to
which video was afforded at the event, the
serious performers (and administrators?)
generally regarded the medium as an OK way
to document the 'proper' stuff, or as a tag on
the end of the National Review bill, alongside
some brilliant, much mediocre and some
atrocious live works.

Video Documentation:
A case of too many cooks...

THERE is obviously a need to document live
work, however there was a considerable
overload in terms of documentation at the
event (at times there were 5 camera crews
floating around recording virtually anything
and everything that moved - when they could
get the cameras to work properly and make
sense of the spaghetti of video cables in the
central foyer area).

On a more serious and disconcerting note
was the sensation of wondering whether at
times performances were being staged for
the cameras- rather than for a live audience,
(in this respect one consolation seemed that
some of the best performance work on show
defied documentation).

This whole area of documentation was one
which raised much interesting discussion
and debate among many of the video makers
present. At a lively but short discussion, the
point was raised by artists working with video
as a 'main' medium whether documentation
of live works could and should merit large
budgets specifically for such uses, especially
when considering the difficulty in working
with the medium directly as an artist.

A valid conclusion that arose was that
performers themselves should consider how
their work is documented and whether they
are going to work for or with the camera and
even if video is the most effective means of
documentation. This whole area is one which
merits much discussion and development.
One possible solution to the problem is the
potential for more direct collaboration
between performer and documenter in the
recording and interpreting of such events.

The Poor Relatives
Reviewed...

IN terms of works commissioned -
specifically video installation, a thread which
ran throughout was the active attempt by the
artists concerned to use performance as an
integral element.

In some this is more self-evident than in
others, in particular Zoe Redman and Francis

Alexander's Room of Clocks which left one
with the feeling of having missed the
performance - of viewing the props, the
situation of the performer, rather than the
performers themselves. This in itself gave the
work a timeless feel, but which like much of
Redman's other work depends on her
presence as a performer and poet.

Simon Herbert's work Totem more
successfully captured this sense, relying on a
childhood experience of watching a family
drown in their car in a freak accident.
Powerful images which have in effect become
commonplace in the late eighties were
combined with a highly charged monologue
read by the artist himself, seen at times keyed
through images of a Vietcong being executed
and a number of other potent images from
the twentieth century (all framed in place of
the usual family snaps on the mantle above a
constructed fireplace which formed the focal
point of the entire work). The performance
element relied on the artist's role as a witness,
helpless yet able to comment and exorcise
his fear and horror on seeing such an event.

Using the same idea of trauma, though in this
case actual rather than observational, Mike
Stubbs' the Myth of Speed falls severely
short of its potential (Stubbs was involved in a
serious road accident a while back). This
work could have had the kind of impact that
something like J. G. Ballard's 'Crash' has on
its readers. Stubbs' concerns became lost by
the poor presentation and lack of clarity of the
imagery in which he deals, but then maybe
some experiences are best forgotten...

Cat Elwes' simple two-screen piece First
House dealt with the experience of mother-
hood; as a male I felt somewhat like a voyeur,
looking into the house on the security and
relationship between mother and child which
this simple construction (a time-based
'Wendy House') explored.

The sound from this work also eventually
became extremely tedious when trying to
become involved in the other work taking
place in the space, a problem due more to the
containment of all the video works in a
relatively small space.

8x5

POTENTIALLY the most effective and
innovative works in the entire festival were
presented over a self-contained five screen,
five source format.

Confusion was the order of things here, with
some artists making work to be viewed in a
more conventional installation sense, where
the viewer comes in, watches for as long as
they like then leaves as was the case in my
work with Alan Robertson as Pictorial
Heroes: The Great Divide, whereas
something such as Andrew Stones' Salmon
Song demanded that the viewer sit and watch
for 40 minutes before being confronted by a
work such as that presented by Kate
Meynell's A Book of Performance, which
only utilised 2 (or was it 3?) screens.

8 works were programmed in such a manner
and ran continuously throughout the day - for
the audience this created a hit and miss
affair, with viewing of specific works being
determined by chance.

However, if you had the time and patience to
view all of these works it would prove a
rewarding experience, ranging as they did
from the visually beautiful piece by Marion
Urch Out of the Ashes to the (over) glossy
comment and assault on the Yuppie
mentality Social Games and Group Dances
presented by Simon Robertshaw and Mike
Jones which utilised the Quantel paintbox.
Another work which effectively used the
Paintbox was Chris Rowland's piece Home on
the Range-, dealing as it did with images of
violence - particularly of death and conflict
by the bullet, set against a shooting gallery
and funfair type environment.

Both these pieces would have benefitted
from a little more clarity and resolution in
terms of issues addressed and a little less
concern with technology and presentation,
a major problem confronting any artist given
the opportunity to work with such technology.
Rowland has subsequently added a further
section to his piece which I have yet to
see.

Dealing with similar issues as Rowland to
some extent, Steve Littman's Street Life -
Something of the present dealt with the
ideas of living with the gun and the type of
Rambo-type mentality dominant in
contemporary culture. Littman's intentions
may be honourable but become lost in an
orgy of violent and exploitative images - many
seen in other Littman pieces (namely 'Smile'
and 'In the name of the gun'). Overall the

point where imagery ceases to be obsessive
and starts to become repetitive is an issue
which arises here.

Throughout all the works with the exception
of Stones' 'Salmon Song', which tended to
deal with the medium itself and is one of a
number of new works emerging which seem
to be reviving the seventies pre-occupation
with the processed image, and the notion of a
'pure video', a number of themes and key
concerns emerged, such as the idea of
cultural/social division and exile (as in the
case of 'The Great Divide', which dealt with
the idea of North and South Divide/Haves
and Have nots and Janusz Szecerek's Open
the Box which contained the divide between
Eastern Bloc and Western Culture and the
interpretations of world events through
Television in the Global Village (or should that
read ghetto?).

Another consideration was the very obvious
concerns of both the male and female artists
involved - the women tending to look inward
and deal with uniquely feminist issues (which
in some cases such as in Marion Urch's work)
contained their own kind of violence whilst
the masculine tended to look outward,
dealing with more broadly based cultural and
political concerns, ranging from the more
obvious instances of male violence (which
were criticised unreasonably by many
women artists present) to explore and probe
conflict and class hierarchies.

On the basis of thise works, apart from the
more obvious considerations, there seems to
be emerging certain styles and techniques
which characterise work produced by both
sexes, Urch's and Meynell's work tending
more to the filmic and poetic, whilst for

example Rowland's and Robertshaw/ Jones's
work tending to be more definitely 'video' in
its use of effects and multi-layered imagery.
Likewise. Steve Littman's Pictorial Heroes
and Janusz Szecerek's relied on what could
be seen as a 'harder' use of video effects and
scratch style editing.

Whether this is a deliberate or accidental
trend will have to wait to be seen, in the
meantime it is apparent that all the artists
involved had something worth showing and
saying - and they did so, effectively,
beautifully, violently and most of the time
chaotically.

Overall the inclusion and profile of video at
the event was down to the hard work and
efforts of Steve Littman.

Unfortunately due to both technical and
organisational problems a similar event at
Glasgow's Third Eye Centre turned into a
badly installed side show which nobody knew
existed. This in itself didn't do the work - nor
any championing of video - any favours.

Problems aside, let's hope that at next year's
event in Glasgow that Video is not seen as the
poor relative of performance and that the
organisers are aware that in staging any work
in this area don't forget what's been
happening in Scotland or with typical
London-style arrogance think they can
dictate and control output.

Taking such an event out of London is both
creditable and worthwhile - the problems
begin when considering the whole context
and validity of decentralising- butthenthat's
a whole new argument to be considered...

□ Mediamatic □

EUROPEAN MEDIA-ART MAGAZINE

Vol. 2 #2 1987

Dutch and English Translation

Philip Hayward on Tee Wee Herman'

Simon Biggs 'Reclamations'

Gustav Hamos

The Arts For Television

Max Bruinsma on Marie-Jo Lafontaine

'Speculations on Video as Dream'
Ed Rankus.

Video Festivals

Distributed in Scotland
by VARIANT MAG

£3.00, plus 50p postage

LIMITED NUMBER!

NOTES ON DISCORD:

Einsturzende Neubaten

and the Destruction of Structures

by Hazel McLaren

"Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and
annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally
creative source of all life. The urge to destroy is also a creative
urge." 1

CREATIVE destruction is a means of
clearing out redundant ideas and
ideology, it means the physical
destruction of the structures and values of
this society. Certain forms of self-destruction
symbolise in microcosm this attack on
society, but also serve as a means of self-
discovery and a celebration of individuality.
There is a traceable line of thought between
those who have dealt with these issues
broadly and who operated on the fringes of
culture and society, mainly from the late 19th
century to the present day. This line of
thought includes Friedrich Nietsche, Michael
Bakunin, Antonin Artaud, the Dadaists. the
Futurists, the Vienna School (Arnolf Rainer,
Herman Nitsch, Rudolf Schwa rtzkogler, Otto
Mull, Gunter Brus), to the Situationists,
Gustav Metzger, Punk Rock in the Seventies
and, since 1979. Einsturzende Neubaten.
All of the aforementioned have dealt with
ideas of creative destruction through various
forms, be it in the visual arts, sound, writing
and in political activity. All of them opposed
the dominant structures and values of
society, were anti-authoritarian, either partly
or in total against the whole notion of
authority. The most contemporary of the
above, Einsturzende Neubaten (translated
'collapsing new buildings') make direct
connection with Artaud, Nietsche, and the
Vienna artists, though more specifically with
Futurism. Neubaten have stated their aims in
a directly political expression as being the
representation of the breakdown of social
structures through the breakdown of musical
structures. The destruction of the body is a
metaphor intended to catalyse the
exploration of the subconscious through its
use in the production of their 'sound'.

Neubaten are based in West Berlin and have
been working together since 1979. They
believe that destruction is a positive force
which results in the birth of new space in
which creation can occur spontaneously.
They work within the discipline of noise and

outside 'popular music', and it might be
described as practising an updated version of
Russolo's 'Art of Noises'. Their vocals are in
German, their native language.

They are notorious for various acts of violence
against the buildings in which they perform,
particularly in an attempt to dig up the stage
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in
London in 1983, during a performance called
'Concerto for Machinery and Voice'. They
openly embrace violence as a method of
creating.

"If I try to tear down this house
in a gentle way it takes a long
time and someone's going to
build up another house while
we're trying to pull down this
one. Life is vandalistic. I think
real emotions are vandalistic." 3

The idea of catharsis, the breaking down of
and destroying certain barriers is important
to the work of Neubaten, every attempt to
reach back into the subconscious means the
breaking down of a myriad of social and
mental barriers.

"The reaction I like to provoke is
when something happens for
myself. I think after a good
performance I should have the
feeling that I've broken through
a certain point in myself and I've
had the feeling of having been
alive for at least a second..." 9
"To break through a certain
point you haven't reached
before." 4

It is through this pushing to extremes that
discoveries are made. It involves the
discovery of, and the destruction of, barriers

that have been set within us precisely to
prevent the acquiring of self-knowledge by a
society that conditions and controls us.

"Although it is a characteristic
of noise to recall us brutally to
real life, THE ART OF NOISE
MUST NOT LIMIT ITSELF TO
IMITATIVE REPRODUCTION. It
will achieve its most emotive
power in the acoustic enjoy-
ment, in its own right, the
artist's inspiration will extract
from combined noises."

The idea that Neubaten begin from has its
origins in Luigi Rossolo's 1913 manifesto on
'The Art of Noises'. Neubaten have used a
traditional 'anti-art' structure to try to destroy
musical structures akin to the Futurists in
their day. Neubaten use the full scale of
Russolo orchestration as well as the additions
from technological advancement
(pneumatic drills, television sets, amplifiers,
guitars, keyboards, etc). The destruction of
'New built musical structures' was their aim
in the beginning through the use of ideasfirst
proposed in 1913, altering it through the
application of modern technology. 'Noise' is
not a new tool in popular music, Hendrix used
feedback from his guitar, though Neubaten
were one of the first groups to apply noise
from any found source with a direct echo in
Russolo's orchestration, with traditional anti-
art aims (with a relationship to Dada) of the
destruction of mediocrity and the destruction
of established forms. Russolo's manifesto
was written at the height of an industrial age
when physical effort still played a major part
in the industrial process. Neubaten give the
image of an epic effort in their somewhat
romantic physicality in the manual
production of their sound. Though Russolo
was talking of building machines as
instruments for the 'futurist orchestra', in the
1980s Neubaten produce their sound by
physical effort. At a time when most music is
synthetically produced, from pop through to
Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, Neubaten
return to a physicality to reconnect more
directly with the world around them.

Russolo states six main categories in his
manifesto. Firstly, the noises of impending
doom and destruction in the process of
happening, rumbles, roars, explosions,
crashes, splashes, booms; these noises carry
with them a feeling of foreboding and
oppression. Neubaten use these to suggest
the sounds of the functioning of the human
body, pulse, heart beat and blood flowing.
Russolo's noises are in fact sometimes
supplemented with the sounds of the human
body, from recordings, as in a foetal heart
detector in 'Neun Arme".

The second category is whistles, hisses and
snorts. These irritating sounds deliberately
prevent relaxation and provoke a reaction
from the listener. Neubaten do not leave their
work open to an indeterminate reaction.

Whispers, murmurs, mumbles, grumbles,
gurgles are vocal noises which Neubaten at
times use to imitate animal noise, or as an
expression of pain and emotion. They are
similar to the use of phonetic poetry as they
bear no resemblance to words but carry
feeling. Screeches, creaks, rustles, buzzes,
crackles, scrapes are yet more noises out of
which screeches and scrapes feature the
most in Neubaten, caused through the
rubbing together of metal surfaces. 'Das
Schaben' (the Scraping) is made entirely
from the noises caused by the friction
between two metal surfaces and is
reminiscent of the American minimalist
composer Glen Branca.

The backbone of Neubaten's sound is
percussive noises on various surfaces. This is
the physical contact with the substance of
their work, which denies the mediation which
is the essence of wider control in society. The
final group bears a resemblance to the third
in that it is the voices of men and animals, but
used in the creation of noise rather than as
speech and this again bears a relationship to
phonetic poetry, in releasing human voices
from the constrictions of language to a more
direct emotional expression.

There is a strong comparison between the
visuals and sound used by some members of
the Berlin Dada group, through the ideas of
montage and phonetic poetry, to the noise
which is the basis of Neubaten's work.
Through photomontage, the Dadaists used
fragments of everyday images assembled
collectively to create a new meaning and to
decode the political hypocrisy of the times.

"This 'gluing on' could be used
in many other ways: against
stupidity and decadence, to lay
the world bare in all its abtruse
insanity."*

Neubaten layer noises in a similar way to the
Dadaists' layering of meaning in
photomontage. Their noises are everyday
fragments combined together to create a
greater whole. These are fragments of a post-
industrial society, and Neubaten combine
them into representations of the isolation and
alienation ofwo/manwithinasocietyinwhich
they see themselves as being slowly and
subtly destroyed..

"Here as in Zurich, total
liberation from preconceived
ideas and previous relation-
ships created new possibilities.
Chance, acclaimed as a miracle
in Zurich, became in Berlin an
article of daily use. It has
abolished logic; so much the
better. Whatever came along

would do - and was preserved
just as it was." 7

The use of 'chance' elements are also
important to Neubaten, as it is used in
phonetic poetry. In Neubaten's later work,
'Halber Mensch', squeals, screams,
screeches and other human vocal noises are
used with great attention to volume, duration
and breath, and they are used in the general
feel of the sound, rather than in the sung
qualities. In 'Sehnsuchf the words which are
used are repeated over and over again and
because they are in German they are more
like sounds (to non-German ears) than words,
and it is in their repetition that the
relationship with phonetic poetry is made,
rather than the meaning of the words.

Does Blixa Bargeld see himself as one of the
four horsemen of the Apocalypse, as death in
particular? He certainly seems to have some
assocations with a 'hound of hell' in the
agonised wails and screams of his vocals, and
is, through his lyrics, very aware of his own
mortality. In the song 'Death is a Dandy' is "A
lungsdrag deep in the void" a reference to
Nietzsche's abyss between the human and
superhuman, in 'Zarathustra'? Bargeld is
prepared to push himself physically and
mentally to extremes, not giving a thought to
future complications through the use of
various stimulants, not content until he has
pushed and broken down another barrier.

"Last Beast (in the sky)" in its
original German is "Letztes
Biest (im Himmell) ', and
Himmell translated means both
sky and heaven, the 'last beast'
being a reference to the devil,
this images also doubles up as
the sun,

"Risen in the East, the East is
Red and set in the West."

The sun and sky are important in Nietsche's
'Zarathustra'. What is the meaning of the sky
and sun to 'Zarathustra'? Is the sun
contentment and the sky freedom through
the lack of gravity? Is the last beast in the sky
chaos and destruction? God is no longer in
heaven and has been replaced by
destruction. Or is it the actual demise of God?

"I am drying out; my light is
dying out." 9

It could also be another reference to the
mortality of Blixa Bargeld, as hinted
previously on the album. It refers also to the
final destruction of everything, Armageddon.

"A burning question: are the
volcanoes still active?" 10

There is an obvious reference here, a wish for
some natural forces of violent change and
destruction to still exist and be threatening. In
a volcano the pressure builds, the lava rises, it
pours down the side of the mountain in rivers,

burning anything in its path. It gives an entire
clearance of the past, and this leaves space
forthefuturetobeborn.Thefireimageryisall
about creative destruction and it occurs
frequently in the songs, asfire, burning, burnt
and inflamed, flames and scorch. It usually
represents destruction in progress,
something nagging for an act to be
committed, within the person. 'Seele brennf
(soul burns), an urge that by necessity has to
be carried out to its very end and no matter
what the result.

"The act I'm talking about aims
for a true organic and physical
transformation of the human
body. Why? Because theatre is
not that scenic parade where
one develops virtually and
symbolically - a myth: theatre is
rather this crucible of fire and
real meat where by an
anatomical trampling of bone,
limbs and syllables bodies are
renewed and the mythical act of
making a body presents itself
physically and plainly." 11

"Free our souls of fungus!
and if that sets the city alight...
well. That's our torch!
let's scorch our souls!" 12

It can be argued that the deliberately
repressive nature of our society causes
frustration and anger which then gives rise to
consciously realised destructive actions
which are of a cultural or political nature...
The destruction of a structure or barriers,
removes impediments against the creation of
something new, ideally spontaneously, in its
place. It acts as a catharsis. Neubaten's use
of an old structure in Russolo's 'Art of Noises'
is effective because it is still an unfamiliar
structure, whereas the use of a very recent
basic set-up as employed in punk rock
groups made it easy for any threat to be
reabsorbed quickly back into the dominant
culture because of its inability to transgress
the 'norm'.

Noise not only destroys the banality and
meaninglessness of pop music but can
negate the alienation the individual suffers in
our culture as a whole. Just as phonetics
releases the voice from the restrictions of
conscious control and the restrictions of
language, the use of body in Neubaten's
performances acts as a catalyst for the
release of the subconscious in the violent
production of their sound.

1 Michael Bakunin.

2 Blixa Bargeld (Einsturzende Neubaten). Zigzag
Magazine.

3. ibid.

4. ibid.

5. Luigi Russolo, 'Futurist Manifesto'.

6 Hans Richter, "Dada Art and Anti-Art'.

7. ibid.

8 Einsturzende Neubaten. Letztes Biest (im Himmell)' on

LP. Halber Mensch .
9. ibid.

10. Einsturzende Neubaten. Armenia' on LP 'Drawings of
0.17.

11. Antonin Artaud. 'Artaud Anthology', p. 169.

12. Einsturzende Neubaten. 'Abfachelin', on LP. Drawings
of O.T.\

ALISTAIR MACLENNAN

OUT THE IN

A National Review of Live Art commission - revised

ISSUES REMAIN:
ETHICS - AESTHETICS
THE OUTSIDER" - POLITICAL/SOCIAL
INSTITUTIONS - RELIGIOUS/POLITICAL
BIGOTRY - INCLUSIVE TOLERANCE -
DERILICTION' AND PUBLIC/PRIVATE
RESPONSIBILITY - OPPOSITIONAL OR
CONSENSUS MEANS OF POLITICAL/SOCIAL
IMPROVEMENT - PLACE AND DISPLACEMENT
DEATH-DECAY
NEW LIFE AND MUTATION
TRANSFORMATION

THE WORK INVOLVES:
LOCATION-DISLOCATION
PLACEMENT-DISPLACEMENT
TIME BEING-TIME EDITED

UNDERLYING ISSUES ARE POLITICAL, SOCIAL
AND CULTURAL.

The art community in the North is small, though growing.
Consequently, one feels one's contribution might make
some difference. With the political instability here, art

which addresses politics, directly or indirectly, can have
more meaning, may count for mor#. than in a politically
stable society. As life and death issues are in constant
focus, it makes one examine more stringently what one's
art is about, who it's for. and how effectively (or not) it
functions. Living here makes one critically reappraise the
poor relationship between art and society (in Britain and
Ireland), between visual 'culture' and visual art.

Bridgcbuilding seems necessary. In the North, on both
sides of the cultural divide, is a down-to-earth
unpretentiousness. I welcome this. In spite of 'the
troubles', and attendant horrors, I enjoy living here.
There are few distractions, which helps to intensify one's
work.

The Holy Grail falls at our feet as holes in our socks.

A hook is a noose by whatever name.

A clock ticks time, be it cheap or expensive.

The wish to 'leave something behind' is the will to cling to
what passes. Height reverts to foundation. Depth fills in.

To learn patience, study rocks.

Alistair MacLennan,,N. Ireland 1987

INTERVIEW

'Out the In' was presented in the new

Performance Space 2 on the top floor of the

Third Eye Centre's premises in Glasgow as part

of a season of performance and 'new theatre'

work called 'New Work/ No Definition) last

October. The 'detached' position of this space

(entering up an unrenovated side staircase

allowing the audience to come and go without

passing through gallery space) was well suited

to Alistair MacLennan, who took total command

of it with his evocative installation/performance
which lasted 3 days. In this interview,
MacLennan - a Scot now resident in Belfast
where he teaches in the MA Fine Art Department
at the University of Ulster - talks about this
work, about his commitment as an artist and
teacher, and the sensibility that informs his
work.

He was interviewed by Malcolm Dickson and
Billy Clark.

BC I read about you studying Zen. in a
previous interview. What is your mental state
when you're doing the performance?

One concentrates on what one's doing as one
does it, to 'fuse' with the activity, at the same
time keeping the mind open to the
potentiality of what might develop. One can,
by remaining 'receptive', make ongoing
alterations, as appropriate.

MD Your eyes were closed most of the time,
from what I observed, as. if you were in a
trance state.

It may appear as trance, but isn't. One's very
aware of the physicality one's in. I'm not
transported to a 'beyond'. We're in the here
and now. 'Entertainment' as art attempts to
take spectators out of their situation and
transport them 'elsewhere'. Ifs a form of
escape. I want people more alert to the
actuality we're in.

MD Are you conscious of the audience being
there in the room' There were several
occasions when there was no-one there

One's conscious of when no-one's there, or
only one person, besides oneself. The activity
has ifs own momentum. Does breathing stop
if not seen?

MD Did you actually deprive yourself of
sleep?

From time to time I dozed.

BC Certain aspects of the objects in the
installation seemed loaded with, not so much
symbolism, but the attitude towards
symbolism. Some appropriate things had
been brought along, but it is interesting to
relate this to the glass case, it does look as if
things have escaped from it or exploded on
this barbed wire landscape. How do you
choose these objects, this debris?

There are several reasons for using the case.
This work, 'Out the In', is an extension of the
one made at Riverside Studios, London,
called 'In the Out'. There were certain

elements I intended to use here, but through
a misunderstanding, two crucial items were
not available. This threw me back. I chose an
empty case to display 'presence' of absence
in protective glass. It became focal.

'...brutality of fact...'

MD You seemtocombineanemphasisintoa
deeper insight into our 'selves' with a social
and political commitment.

BC Is this related to the notion of art objects? ,t>s essential.

Yes, but in reference to life. Ifs like a fish
tank. What might fish represent to an
ecologist?

BC It's obviously being used as a symbol, but
there is the rotting element.

I'm interested in decay, where it constitutes
the discrepancy between ideology and
actuality. The fish is a Christian symbol. Ifs
also a symbol for subconscious mind and and
subterranean levels of awareness not usually
manifest in 'waking' reality. Then there's
pollution and 'dead' matter. Fish smell and
rot, as do religious/ political ideologies
(locally and globally).

MD Those elements of life and death were
very strong in the work. I found it quite
disturbing to be within the installation/
performance. The discarded children's
shoes, for example, the X-Ray photographs on
the windows suggesting the fragility of the
human condition. The sound tape combined
seagull cries with Irish pipe music being
played backwards, possibly, and then there
was the scund of what could have been a
baby's wails, on first entering the world. And
then you have the fish rotting in real time.

BC In some sense the backwards music was
like tourism in reverse. What was possibly
'quaint and Irish' becomes disturbing. It's the
same with the confetti on the floor; there's a
sort of celebration, the funereal kind of thing.
It ties in strongly with the Irish context.

I'm living there. I don't subscribe to making
art in a vacuum, or to arf s being an hermetic
activity whose life depends on being
contained within gallery walls. Aesthetics
alone is effete. As well as grace there's the

BC It's a spiritual and political thing.

To have both feet on the ground, exactly
where we are, is useful. Fusion between
spiritual and political/ social/cultural facts of
our lives is important, not as hand-me-down
'beliefs', but as directly discerned, first hand.

BC Has that attitude been formed by living in
Ireland, or has that been integral to your work
for a long time?

Some of it grappled with (as a student) in
Dundee. There I learned various art skills, but
faced the resulting dilemma of questioning
the worth of it. - On leaving college, students
faced a massive wall of indifference to their
work. They had to 'make sense' of this and act
on it. Many gave up, relinquished their
creativity, and joined the swollen ranks of the
Deeply Asleep. I saw the artist as a spiritual
'salesman', cut off from an anchored function
in society. - Through committed persever-
ance one evolves a discernment of art's real
worth. Pat answers don't cut it.

BC But it's not enough for art to reflect the
de-spiritualised state of society.

No. That's only one feature.

BC You have talked about 'wholeness'...

Wholeness embraces everything - positive
and negative.

BC Artists like to think of themselves as
being outside society.

The artist isn't outwith society. One may feel
alienated from many of its values. The
public is a collective of individuals. You're a
member, as am I.

BC It's one of these characteristics that has
come into being so that the artist can get
exalted; you denigrate one aspect of society
to exalt another...

Individuals are empowered to 'unstop' their
own creativity. Unfortunately, from an early
age, we've been mentally conditioned to Not
Know. Damage done through education (so-
called) disconcerts. Through blind and
'knowing' ignorance, many parents and
teachers rape and castrate the imagination of
children, before they're seven. A few escape.
Most don't. It may be disturbing and
disorientating to temporarily suspend
judgement and 'lift the lid' of accrued values,
to see whaf s deeper, to uncover what's below
private/ public veneer. Art can heal.

MD it means addressing all of those things
that people have repressed within
themselves to make life tolerable. That, in
itself, seems an important function of art at
the moment. But it also seems that the
amazing, unpredictable and spontaneous
elements in everyday life seem to be
disappearing through the reductionism of our
present culture...

It happens through streamlining, unitising
and subliminal repetition.

MD ...So art should propose an "imaginative
resistance' to these forces.

Yes. Information is so controlled and
manipulated through the distorting agents of
television and press (gutter or other). Forced
reliance on business funding and private
sponsorship places substantial pressure on
art groups to generate products which reflect
the values of sponsors. It's hard to imagine
effective art, openly critical of government
policies, being sponsored through business.
That puts increased pressure on 'difficult/
work during this reactionary, most
conservative decade.

MD Do you think there are enough people
aware of that to be able to resist it in some sort
of way?

ril resist it and I'm certain others will. In the
1980s there's precious little evidence,
nationally or internationally, of ground-
breaking, innovative art of social conscience
being seen. Is it being made? Many venues
showing difficult' work are closing, unable to
keep going financially. We need them to
counter the prevailing fodder of Mixed-Hash,
Mish-Mashed aesthetic redundancies,
strutting cockily (heedlessly) as 'chickened
ouf market art of the '80s.

■G On the one hand you have people doing
things, learning and changing things and on
the other hand you have a lot of oppressive
forces moving in.

There's conflict. If s up to artists not to get
downtrodden, but to retain 'edge'. We're
innovators and instigators, individually and
collectively and shouldn't allow 'outside'
manipulators to dictate our development. Art
groups unable to get exhibitions in accredited
institutions can house their own, and/or find
alternative venues and methods of exhibiting

Alistair MacLennan at Rochdale Art Gallery.
Projects UK

'Touring Exhibitionists' 1984. Photo: Steve Collins/

Alistair MacLennan, the British Art Show. South ampton. 1985. Photo: Steve Collins. ■ Projects U.K.

inside or out of gallery circuits. Art groups in
the '80s could intervene far more practically
and effectively than hitherto in political,
social and cultural arenas.

BC It's taking the whole situation into your
own hands

Government's attitude to the arts will worsen.
If a gallery won't give me a show, I can put one
on myself in my studio, where I live, or in the
street. I'll invite friends. They can invite me to
theirs. Before long, essential art may bypass
official institutions and operate another
circuit, run by artists. There are precedents.
In numerical terms, an operation, though
miniscule, can yet be effective. One simple
network may map new worlds.

MD That involves an element ot failure You
need failure as well as success, otherwise the
art |ust panders to institutional thought

We learn to walk by falling, crawling and
picking ourselves up (in life and art).

MD It is difficult to determine what these
successes or failures might be. With a lot of
live work it takes a long period of time to
'judge' a performance, the element of
memory.

It takes weeks, months and years for images
to 'settle', for resonance to fully evolve in
mind . ..or less than a second ...to see' beneath
societal Facelift.

A POLISH STORY

by Karen Eliot

/N 1969 Andrzej Dudek sat in a full lotus
upon a rug in a small room in Wroclaw.
Grey streaks of Polish dawn filtered
through threadbare curtains into the
cluttered interior which hosted humble
furnishings including a small one-man bed
and hundreds of books. A total peace
occupied Andrzej's head. A gentle smile
teased the corners of his girlish lips and gave
his smooth hairless face a particular beauty
and calm. In this suspended state, like a deep
pool awaiting the intrusion of its first ripple,
his body and mind were completely void and
therefore completely vulnerable. His lightly
closed eyelids twitched imperceptibly as
though a wee optic nerve sought to focus
upon a vision that was not quite recognisable.
As the nerve pulled the inner image into a
form, Dudek's whole inner space was filled
with the presence of something far greater
than his own. First, absolute blackness
overwhelmed his brain, accompanied by a
chilling, heart-crushing, bowel-quaking
sense of evil. Rapidly this awesome terror was
usurped by its complete opposite which
slowly melted into a feeling of heavenly
warmth and golden perfection. After bathing
in this glory and self enlightenment for an
incalculable time, Dudek's eyelids snapped
open to reveal bright staring eyes which took
in the room's contents like those of a petrified
hare searching for a bolt hole. It was at this
precise moment that Andrzej Dudek realised
he was the reincarnation of Albrecht Durer
and that his being was full of Durer*s haunting
portrayal of the horsemen of the apocalypse.

Karen Eliot opened her/his eyes. It was dark
and bloodhot. The air was thick and pungent
with musk. Beneath the covers in a grey
gloom Karen could discern a familiar
landscape of skin and muscle: not her/his
own. S/he moved her/his listless hand over
the comforting slopes of flesh in a stroking
motion towards north. This unconscious
action precipitated a response. The
geography of carnal companionship stirred.
Karen Eliot pulled down the duvet and
simultaneously straightened her/his body
thereby in one gesture propelling her/his
head outwards into the cold pale light of a
wintry november dawn in 1987. Two small
hands pointed to a seven and a six. The bus
from London was not due until 8:40. Karen
Eliot did not need to rise until 8:10 thereby
giving her/himself fifteen minutes to piss,
wash and dress, plus five further minutes to
put on outer garments before leaving the attic
at 8:30. It took precisely seven minutes to
walk to the bus station. There were forty
minutes remaining of bedtime. Forty minutes
in which to stimulate the juices. Forty
minutes in which to reach the peak of another
orgasm.

APOKALIPSA BEZ SMIERCI

The fetid stench of death and decay lingered
in his nasal memory leaving an obnoxious
taste at the back of his throat. Albrecht Durer
has fled his hometown of Nurenberg in July
1494 using the outbreak of plague as a
pretext. Ringing his his ears, like a
campanologist's nightmare, were his wife's
acidic taunts, the real reason for his hasty
exile, which now threatened to destroy the
peace and singular solitude of Padua. His
father's idea of a marriage for financial
convenience was to A'brecht a hellish
inconvenience and bothersome imposition
on his personal lifestyle. Durer preferred the
homosocial atmosphere of the stuben and its
creative polemic to that of domestic tittle-
tattle. Laying his drawing materials aside
Albrecht stretched out to gaze up at the great
ultramarine ceiling of a Renaissance sky,
interrupted only by the dark stippling effect of
leaves that grew on the olive boughs under
which he lay. His golden shoulder length

SERIGRAFIA 1984

tresses interlaced with honey scented flora
and his head crushed sweet perfumes from
trapped herbage. An expression of complete
ease and contentment painted his girlish
features. His full red lips drew a subtle smile.
As A.D. tumbled headlong into more
subterranean levels of consciousness dark
visions danced behind his retinas. Satanic
shapes merged with half recognisable
mythological animals cajoling his
imagination into inventing more substantial
creatures. Out of his plague-ridden
landscape, populated now with screeching
harridans, four monumental beings reared
into full view. Such was the power of their
presence that Albrecht could feel the heat of
the horses' breath and smell the musty sweat
from their frothing flanks. Their equestrian
counterparts shouted cryptic messages to
one another then wheeled to gallop over the
cringing figure of Durer lying prostrate
beneath a clouding heaven. With a loud

scream he awoke sitting abruptly up, erect
and damp with perspiration. The four riders
of the apocalypse had consumed his
internalised space and would never be
forgotten. When he returned to Nurenberg in
1495 Albrecht Durer worked passionately for
ten years. During this time he completed The
Apocalypse, the first book ever to be designed
and published exclusively by an artist.

A 35mm camera, like a stork's eye atop three
legs, recorded the small room's cluttered
interior in Wroclaw. An odour of pickled
beetroot and damp body musk was being
heated by an old-fashioned looking water-
filled radiator. A makeshift silk screen table
stood against one wall. Homemade inks and
pigments occupied various recycled
containers stacked neatly on well-stocked
shelves. Prints of delicate designs hung from
a string line attached by wooden clothes
pegs. Obsessive images on the theme of self-
examination juxtapositioned with those of
Albrecht Durer. In a previous time space
Andrzej Dudek Durer had learnt to make
sitars. Now three self-made examples of this
intricate instrument shared his cramped
quarters. He had not left the room for ten
months. He would remain in the close
confinement of his cell for one year. He would
not leave Wroclaw for five years nor Poland
until 1979. Since his awakening in 1969 life
had become a performance. Everyday rituals
occupied his time. His days were full. Visitors
were few but sufficient in number to sustain
him through the darker passages. He fasted.
He ate a strict vegetarian diet. He made his
own bread. He grew his hairand beard, uncut
since 1969. During extreme moments of total
self-awareness he could feel it growing (hear
it) in the room's dimness and crushing
silence. By observing this rigid lifeart he
balanced his inner harmonies and
telepathically communicated. In 1976
Andrzej Dudek Durer stopped painting to
concentrate his creative energies on his first
mail art project which was confined to his
native Poland. By 1978 he had joined the
legions of international mail artists thereby
placing his Wroclaw cell on the global map of
the correspondence network.

A firm breast, kissed golden and pipped with
a brown erect nipple, filled Karen's eye. S/he
naked too, had her/his head at such an
angle as to squish-up blind her/his left eye
thereby allowing her/his right to sightsee. A
shocking black on white banner headline
glared out from among the stripey towelling
and ambre solaire: ELVIS EST MORT. Drifting
as though on a lazy breeze, hearing muted
sounds of seaside frolicks, Karen Eliot
suspended her/himself in a sunsoaked
vacuum. Jonathan Richman's roadrunner
lyric filled her/his mind's ear. S/he was in
touch with the modern world. Karen Eliot had
not eaten for three days. S/he had travelled
non-stop by hitch-hiking from the north of
Europe to feel the heat. Her/his skin prickled
as the late afternoon sun seared out of the
blue flawless agony. S/he left the beach and
floated away into another dimension
altogether. During this transportation by an
abstract power, Karen encountered a

concept. At first it was imperceptible.
Virtually unseen yet barely visible. After some
moments the concept moved towards
her/him like an asteroid approaching slowly
through the void of internalised space. Atf irst
Karen did not recognise it and although it
held her/his attention fora concrete period of
time it was until s/he opened her/his eyes
that its form took on meaning. The telepathic

journey had put Karen Eliot into direct
correspondence with hundreds of
likeminded souls whose kinetic energies met
and danced on the astral plane to the
continual global beat of collective
consciousness. Asa resultofthissartoriinSt.
Tropez Karen Eliot began to mail her/his art
and work tirelessly for the following ten years.

Karen Eliot stood behind and slightly to one
side of the figure who was clad in an ex-GI
parka, patched Levis, multi-repaired brown
shoes and black shirt while a tired but cheery
busdriver lugged baggage out from the
cavernous rear end of the bus. A large
wooden box on castors resembling an
oversized metronome case were
unceremoni ou sly lumped onto the
oilstained tarmac. The thin tramplike figure
bent to lay a hand to the wooden box's handle.
Karen Eliot stooped to lift a pale grey and blue
nylon holdall at the same second, which also
belonged to the possessor of the strange box
on wheels. Their eyes engaged for the first
time and although they had never met nor
before spoken to each other there was an
instant exchange of great warmth and
familiarity. "Good morning" said Karen. "I
trust you had a pleasant journey." "Very good"
replied Andrzej Dudek Durer as their smooth
skinned hands stretched out to touch each
other in that age-old gesture of greeting and
recognition.

In 1987 Andrzej Dudek Durer visited
Scotland for the first time at the officia'
invitation of The Dundee Resources Centre
for the Unemployed. Thus was part of his fifth
fifth European tour since 1983 during which
time he did the following:

03:11:87 arrived in Dundee

04:11:87 began to install his exhibition of

graphics and photographs in the

DRCU
05:11:87 completed his installation at the

DRCU and produced an edition of

xeroxed books
06:11:87 performance at the DRCU
07:11:87 dismantled his installation at the

DRCU and visited Rockhead
08:11:87 made bread and pizza
09:11:87 travelled to Glasgow
10:11:87 began to install his exhibition of

graphics and photographs at

Transmission
11:11:87 completed his installation at

Transmission
12:1 1:87 performance at Transmission after

which he dismantled the

installation and travelled to

Edinburgh
13:11:87 began to install his exhibition of

graphics and photographs in the

Demarco Gallery
14:11:87 completed the installation, did his

performance and dismantled the

installation at Demarco's. Made

bread and pizzas
15:11:87 travelled to Dundee and made

bread
16:11:87 made video in the Data Attic
17:11:87 travelled to Stirling
18:11:87 travelled to London

POST-MODERNISM

AND THE 'POST-MODERN
DEBATE IN BRITAIN':

AN

INTRO-
DUCTION

by

Peter
Suchin

Lyotard at University of Warwick. February 1987. Photo: Paul Crowther

THE FOLLOWING is an unedited paper presented by Peter Suchin
to an audience at Warwick University in February 1987, though it
was "presented outside the academic institution". Resisting the
fashionable references to 'post-modernism' which appear in visual
art, architecture and philosophy areas, Suchin clarifies the context
out of which the term has arisen.

/am going to concentrate my talk 1 upon
the wide-ranging cultural changes which
are the subject-matter of the so-called
'Postmodern Debate', a debate which has
formed itself in Britain within the last two or
three years. This phrase was actually
employed in the title of a two-day conference
which took place at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London in May 1985: 'A
Question of Postmodernity: The
Philosophical Dimension of the Postmodern
Debate'. Such a title suggests that there was
already some sort of fairly coherent
discussion about Postmodernism ongoing in
Britain before the conference took place. It
appears that the 'debate' 'took off' in Britain in
1984, with the publication of two relatively
short texts - 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism' by the American
literary theorist Fredric Jameson (which
appeared in the July/ August issue of Mew
Left Review), and the book The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, by the French philosopher Jean-
Francois Lyotard. These works became
available in America atthe same timeastheir
publication here but whereas in the USA they
were merely further contributions to an
already ongoing discussion, they took on, in
this country, the status*bf initiatory texts.
Some of Jameson's material had already
been made available in America in 1983, 2
and Lyotard's book first appeared, in a French
edition, in 1979. lam not suggesting that the
concept of 'Postmodernism' was entirely
unknown in Britain prior to the appearance of
these two essays but it was with these that
discussions of Postmodernism here really
began. New Left Review published three
replies to Jameson's piece and The Post-
modern Condition provoked a considerable
response. At least two commentators, Philip
Derbyshire and Geoffrey Bennington 3
suggest that it is Lyotard's name which is
most closely linked with Postmodernism in
Britain. Indeed, Bennington explicitly states
that the impetus for the ICA conference was
the appearance in English of Lyotard's book.
Lyotard himself was in attendance at the ICA,
as he was at another conference devoted to
his work which was held at Warwick
University at the end of last month. 4 It is
interesting too that Jameson supplied a
'Foreword' to the translation of The
Postmodern Condition, in which some of
the themes of his own New Left Review
essay reappeared.

It would be naive to presume that the 'debate',
such as it is, was entirely spontaneous. The
potential of the term 'Post-Modern' as a
'buzzword' which could be used to sell books
was obviously recognised by the publishers
Macmillan when they placed an advertise-
ment in the ICA conference booklet under the
heading 'MACMILLAN TEXTS FOR A POST-
MODERN AGE". And in 1985 Pluto Press
published a collection of essays entitled
Postmodern Culture, a book which had in its
previous - American - incarnation been
called The Anti-Aesthetic. Other titles such
as Reflexivity The post-modern predica-
ment and the glossy pamphlet What is Post-
Modernism? have recently appeared. 5 One

might also mention in passing that the
erstwhile scholarly term 'Post-modernism'
has now reached the 'general public', being
the subject of a series of articles in The
Guardian last December as well as being
fleetingly referred to within the television
series State of the Art, currently being
shown on Channel 4. 6

'Postmodernism' is a label which refers, in
its most comprehensive sense, to the cultural
products and relations which accompany the
arrival of a new type of social organisation,
variously described as 'consumer society',
'media society', the 'society of the spectacle'
(in Guy Debord's phrase), or 'post-industrial
society' in that of Daniel Bell. 7 It is also the tag
attached to a number of distinct stylistic
features within the particular fields of
architecture, painting and literature. For the
most part I intend to use the word in its more
general sense , that as an umbrella term
describing what Jameson has called 'a
cultural dominant: a conception which allows
for the presence and coexistence of a range of
very different, yet subordinate features." 8
These features include - and Jameson is not
alone in presenting them - a breakdown
between previously distinct relations (the
country and the city, the public and the
private, 'high' and 'low' cultural forms, 'truth'
and 'fiction'); a novel involvement with
history, both at the personal level and at what
might be termed that of whole ways of life;
and a new type of human subject, usually
described as 'fragmented', 'schizophrenic' or
'split'.

An important point to note about
Postmodernism is its intimate relation to
Modernism proper. Though Postmodernism
apparently constitutes a radical break with
Modernist culture it is nonetheless parasitic
upon it, and any understanding of the
former depends upon one's view of the latter.
On the one hand Postmodern culture may be
defended as populist and liberatory whilst the
'difficult' works of a Joyce or a Picasso are
condemned as elitist; on the other, it may be
viewed as the taming and recuperation of the
critical tradition of Modernism. In this
scheme Modernism figures as the authentic,
if somewhat aggressive, culture, an attempt
to realise 'Utopian' values which failed in its
task of transformation. 'Modern Art',
erstwhile the critical, radical form of culture
finds itself well-established but dead, buried
in the museum as tourist spectacle and
stripped of its power to provoke change.

But if it is accepted that we have now entered
a phase of culture which has gone beyond
that of Modernism (whether or not one sees
Modernism as a progressive movement) it is
still necessary to distinguish between two
different approaches, between what Hal
Foster has labelled a 'postmodernism of
resistance' and a 'postmodernism of
reaction'. 9 Postmodernism in its 'resistant'
form attempts to develop further the radical
critique of culture which its protagonists
attribute to Modernism, whilst the
'postmodernism of reaction' takes as a
central task the return to traditional values

and representations. From this latter
perspective the modern movement signals
an acute cultural and moral decline.

Before I go on to discuss in some detail those
things presently subsumed under the
concept of Postmodernism a few words about
the history of the term. 10 It was first used in
1934 in a Spanish rendering by Fredericode
Onis to describe a slightly reactionary form of
Modernist poetry. Here the application
figured as a classification within literary
criticism. The first usage of the term to refer
to an entire epoch or period was made by the
British historian Arnold Toynbee, in the
volumes of his A Study of History which
were published from 1954 onwards. In this
work Toynbee suggests that a new phase in
Western history began in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century with the decline of the
modern period, the post-modern period
being an^ge characterised as anarchic and
transitional, and lacking in a clear direction.

The first appearance of 'Postmodern' within
the arts in recent years is again within literary
criticism, in an essay by the American Irving
Howe entitled 'Mass Society and Postmodern
Fiction' and published in Partisan Review in
1959. The idea of a new type of literature, and
even a new type of culture becomes quite
widespread in the 1960s and 70s within the
work of critics like lhab Hassan, Susan
Sontag, Harry Levin, Lionel Trilling and
George Steiner. 11 Steiner's numerous
references to the concept of a 'Post-Culture',
that is to a social system where artistic
products no longer intrinsically display or
reproduce a unifying bond of moral and
scholarly values, matches fairly closely that
view offered within the discouse of
Postmodernism which equates contemp-
orary culture with a slackening or decline, 'a
sort of sorrow in the Zeitgeist' as Lyotard
puts it in one context. 12 Here it might be
appropriate to mention too Adorno and
Horkheimer's important essay on the
'culture industry' (first published in 1944)
which makes many points relevant to the
concerns of the Postmodern critics; Adorno's
famous remark - made in a more recent
piece on cultural criticism - that 'To write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' precedes
both Steiner's and Lyotard's comments on
Culture loss of a moral, critical thread. 13

I have referred to the idea of a radical break
with which the period of Modernism closes
and at which point we enter into the
Postmodern era. 'Our working hypothesis',
writes Lyotard, 'is that the status of knowledge
is altered as societies enter what is known as
the postindustrial age and cultures enter
what is known as the postmodern age.' 14 He
goes on to attribute the period of this rupture
as being around the end of the 1950s, an
estimate with which Jameson concurs. But
though both writers focus upon the late '50s
as the end of Modernism their respective
conceptions of exactly what it is that has
ended differ considerably. Lyotard's view is
the more extreme. A concise account of his
position can be found in an interview which
he gave in 1985. The Postmodern is, he says:

'...based fundamentally upon the
perception of the exietence of a
modern era that dates from the time
of the Enlightenment and that has
now run its course; and this modern
era was predicated on a notion of
progress in knowledge, in the arts,
In technology, and in human
freedom as well, all of which was
thought of as leading to a truly
emancipated society: a society
emancipated from poverty,
despotism, and ignorance. But all of
us can see that development
continues to take place without
leading to the realization of any of
these dreams of emancipation.' 1 *

It is, then, the end of an entire age, of an entire
way of life. In contrast, Jameson's
interpretation appears to classify the
transition as one from the period
characterised by the decline of realism in the
arts (circa 1890) to the beginning of the
1960s - a period of only some seventy years.
Nevertheless, the key reason given for the
break is the same in both cases: the
introduction and rapid development of
nuclearand electronic technologies since the
Second World War. Jameson provides a
Marxist account of the transition to the new
technology by citing a short passage from
Ernest Mandel's book Late Capitalism, first
published in English in 1975. 16 In this work
Mandel divides the history of Capitalism into
three distinct stages, each determined by the
appearance of important developments
within the evolution of machinery:

The fundamental revolutions in
power technology - the technology
of the production of motive
machines by machines - thus
appears as the determinant moment
in revolutions of technology as a
whole. Machine production of
steam-driven motors since 1848;
machine production of electric and
combustion motors since the 90s of
the 19th century; machine
production of electronic and
nuclear-powered apparatuses since
the 40s of the 20th century - these
are the three general revolutions in
technology engendered by the
capitalist mode of production since
the "original" industrial revolution
of the later 18th century." 7

We have thus entered, if Mandel is correct,
what Jameson calls 'the purest form of capital
yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion
of capital into hitherto uncommodified
areas. ..a new and historically original
penetration of Nature and the
Unconscious'. 18 . Mandel's three phases can
accordingly be linked to the three cultural
phases offered in Jameson's analysis:
realism, Modernism and Postmodernism.

For Jameson, then, Postmodernist art is the
art of multinational capital, aesthetic
innovation having been generally integrated
into commodity production. This is not to
imply that 'culture', a once autonomous or
semi-autonomous sphere has been

extinguished. There has been, rather, an
'explosion' of culture, an aestheticisation of
everyday life which has made it almost
impossible to distinguish the 'cultural' from
the 'social'. And if such differences are
abolished then so too is the possibility of
distinguishing between reality and image.
'Criticism', wrote Walter Benjamin over sixty
years ago, 'is a matter of correct distancing.' 19
Today it is precisely the ability to distance
oneself from media representations of 'the
real' which is lacking. One lives, rather, in a
half-world fashioned largely from stereo-
typical 'pictures' offered by the media as
natural, neutral images. Yet since an ideology
of 'realism' predominates and unifies the
jerky flow of pictures and sounds which we
call 'mass culture' the quotidian world takes
on a surrealistic tint. Lyotard notes that
cinema and television stabilise meanings in
such a way as to give the (very powerful)
impression of a jet-set 'lifestyle' as desirable
and 'natural':

'Eclecticism is the degree zero of
contemporary general culture: one
listens to reggae, watches a
western, eats McDonald's food for
lunch and local cuisine for dinner,
wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and
'retro' clothes in Hong Kong;
knowledge is a matter for TV games.
It is ieasy to find a public for eclectic
works. By becoming kitsch, art
panders to the confusion which
reigns in the 'taste' of the patrons...
But this realism of the 'anything
goes' is in fact that of money... Such
realism accommodates all tenden-
cies, just as capital accommodates
all 'needs', providing that the
tendencies and needs have
purchasing power.' 10

Those who don't lead such a free and easy
existence are at least expected to crave for
something like it. But at the same time as
such self-indulgence is paraded as normal
the 'real' tendency is toward fragmentation
and dispersal. Jameson employs the figures
of parody and pastiche to characterise
different modes of behaviour within
Modernism and Postmodernism. If in
Modernism one encounters artists who
deliberately adopt the stylistic features of
another artist in order to caricature or ridicule
them, in Postmodernism one finds that such
mimicry has been replaced by a flat, as it
were indifferent copying of form. Parody
operates in a context wnerein some linguistic
or visual norm acts as a background to, first of
all, the idiosyncratic mode of a 'Modernist'
and then the exaggeration of that mode.
Parody assumes that a norm has been
transgressed and it takes that transgression
further and makes fun of it. Pastiche, by
contrast, comes about when any norm there
might once have been has long since broken
down. It is therefore a case of borrowing the
stylistic features of a given mode but without
the ulterior motive of mockery or criticism.
Since there is no consensus about there
being an authentic style, no sense of a clear
tradition, one finds amongst Postmodern
artists a predilection for collage, as though

the narrative of History had come to an end
and one was only able to fabricate 'new' works
of art by patching together the superficial
features of many different practices and
styles. The move from parody to pastiche has
its resonance in the way that in recent years
there has been a pluralisation of social codes
and jargons, ethnic, gender and racial
groups, and minority political parties, all
however ostensibly unified by the bonds of
eclecticism to which Lyotard refers.
Individual lives, too. are put together like the
collaged pictures to which I have just
referred. The following remarks by Michael
Newman need not be seen as only applicable
to contemporary art: 'Postmodern parody', he
writes, 'is closer to the cynical nihilism of
fashion and the mass-culture industry...
involving the implicit assertion that if
everything is permitted then it makes no
difference what we do and nothing is worth
anything.' 21

It is of some interest that Newman connects
contemporary nihilism with an important
component of Lyotard's complex account of
Postmodernity which I have up to now
neglected in any detail. This is the theme of
what he calls the collapse of the grand
narratives of legitimation. I have quoted
Lyotard talking of the failure of the
Enlightenment project; it has become, in his
estimation, clear that developments in
science are no longer defensible in terms of
the benefits the human race stands to gain
from such 'techno-sciences'. Science has
been used to increase misery and disease
rather than make manifest the Utopia
inherent within the modern narrative of the
Enlightenment, a narrative which it was
presumed must culminate in emancipation.
But we no longer have faith in the project -
Lyotard cites the death camps of the Second
World War and the horrors enacted in the
name of Marxism as proof that we have left
the modern period, with its belief in the
inevitability of salvation, behind." Arguments
about the importance of scientific research
no longer legitimate themselves by the 'meta-
discourse' of Reason or Freedom - instead
one finds justifications presented in terms of
performativity, that is, in terms of the
efficiency of the system. Lyotard takes
Wittgenstein's concept of 'language-games'
as the model for the basis of Postmodern
society. 23 Wittgenstein considered that
language was made up of a multiplicity of
'games', each requiring adherence to a
particular set of rules - different types of
utterance are required in different games,
and the failure to produce the correct type of
utterance within a given game counts as an
illegitimate move. Sometimes such a novel
move can result in the transformation of the
rules of that particular language-game, but
this is a rare occurence. Lyotard's analogy
reads the social totality as a collection of
similarly disposed games, each demandinga
specific type of utterance or mode of

behaviour. 'Science' constitutes one of the
more important games on the Postmodernist
map because it is the form of life which is
most closely linked to the ideology of realism
to which I have referred in connection with

the mass media. Science as a particular field
or game is concerned with particular types of
action, particular moves. These moves are
legitimate when they comply with the rules of
the game, regardless of their correspondence
with what might be termed 'the real world'. It
is a somewhat incestuous affair; Lyotard
makes the following observation:

The object* and the thoughts which
originate in scientific knowledge
and tha capitalist economy convoy
with thom ono of tha rulas which
supports thalr possibility...' This is
'tha rula that there ia no raality
unlass tastifiad by a consensus
batwaan partners over a certain
knowledge and certain commit-
ments."

The partners to whom Lyotard is referring are
the 'experts' who make up the 'scientific
community'. Doing science has become a
matter of playing the game in a manner which
is complicit with the views of the experts. Yet
this very specific language-game has the
status of attributing the boundaries and
conventions which make up 'the real'. Truth
becomes an effect of the best performance.
With the introduction of computer technology
the issue at stake in science is no longer one
of knowledge as an end in itself. It becomes,
rather, something to be traded. 'It is
conceivable that the nation-states will one
day fight for control of information,' writes
Lyotard, 'just as they battled in the past for
control over territory, and afterwards for
control of access to and exploitation of raw
materials and cheap labour.' 25 Whatever
cannot be translated into computer language
will cease to be considered as valuable
information and will be abandoned. The
question of access to computer languages
and networks of communication becomes a
political issue. In this scheme of things the
moral imperatives associated with, for
example, Marxism, do not carry any weight.
As Lyotard explains towards the end of the
Postmodern Condition the post industrial
system is severe:

Rights do not flow from hardship,
but from tha fact that tha alleviation
of hardship improves the system's
performance. The needs of the most
underprivileged should not be used
as a system regulator as a matter of
principle: since the means of
satisfying them is already known,
their actual satisfaction will not
Improve the system's performance,
but only Increase ita expend-
itures."

Furthermore, the system is terroristic; refusal
to accept the rules prescribed for each game
results in the threat of elimination from the
game and thus marginalisation. 'Science' is
only one of the multiple games which make up
the social fabric but its interrelation with the
media and the economy gives it a somewhat
privileged position. Yet Lyotard coi .cedes that
it is possible to disrupt the imposed consensus
by a sort of foregrounding of minority
games. 27 It is nevertheless possible to see the
impact of such struggles being dispersed c : 'e

easily in a culture in which scientific
validations are themselves the result of an
accumulation of fragments rather than the
product of a totalising narrative. 28

I should point out that Lyotard has in recent
years abandoned his formerly Marxist stance.
This is consistent with his view of Post-
modernity as the collapse of grand narratives,
one of which would be the Marxist concept of
Historical Materialism. Jameson, as I have
suggested, holds to a Marxist view. It is his
contention that the grand narratives have not
broken up but have, as it were, gone
underground, to re-emerge, one supposes, at
some later moment.- 19 Jurgen Habermas has
called Modernity 'An Incomplete Project', a
point on which Lyotard has commented quite
sharply, accusing him of a nostalgia for an
Hegelian totality which it is no longer possible
- or even desirable - to achieve. 30 Peter Dews,
a prominent British supporter of Habermas
has argued that Lyotard's claims for
Postmodernity are over-hasty, suggesting
that the terrors of the twentieth century may
signify (as do crises in the arts) fundamental
problems within the Enlightenment project
but not the end of the project as such. That
the death camps and Stalinist purges still
appear to us as terrible crimes is proof
enough that the moral movement implicit in
the Enlightenment narrative has not been
dissolved. 31

Lyotard does use the term 'Postmodern' in
another way, which doesn't simply act as a
label for the period after Modernism (when
Modernism is equated with the project of the
Enlightenment). This second usage concerns
a moment or phase within the arts which
recurs throughout history. It is more a
condition of the arts than a stylistic feature
and by it Lyotard refers to a situation when
artists are working blindly, that is, without
rules; 'rules' are formulated for this practice
after the event. The Postmodern in this sense
would be that which 'puts forward the
unpresentable in presentation itself; that
which denies itself the solace of good
forms'. 32 Lyotard considers the recent return
to 'expressive', 'painterly' practices a^ being
an example of mannerism in the arts. This
view is not inconsistent with Jameson's ideas
about the loss of a 'subversive' edge in the art
of Postmodernism. Such mannered work is,
for Lyotard, complicit with the 'realism' of the
mass media - everything is in its place,
including the human subject, who will be able
to 'arrive easily at the consciousness of his
own identity'. 33 Lyotard contrasts the
philosopher with the 'expert'. The
philosopher, like the artists of whom Lyotard
approves, works blindly and the subject
becomes, to use a phrase from Julia Kristeva,
a 'subject in process'. 34 The work of the expert
is, on the contrary, limiting and repressive.
The techno-sciences which Lyotard concerns
himself with in The Postmodern Condition
also destabilise the human subject and it is
clear that this rigorous 'shaking up' of the
apparently fixed 'bourgeois' subject is seen
by Lyotard as a positive move. In his final
contribution to the booklet based on the ICA
conference on Postmodernity Lyotard makes
'eference to 'the pop viewer or spectator...

who is is a product of.. .the commodity'. 3 '' As a
method of resistance to the culture industry
he proposes the making of television
programmes or work in other forms 'which
produce in the viewer. ..an effect of
uncertainty and trouble'. I think Lyotard
hopes to initiate a reflexive rather than
passive reaction in the viewer by this method
- yet it is not clear how the schizoid subject
which Jameson appears to be criticising as a
product of Late Capitalism compares with or
differs from the 'radicalised' subject
discussed by Lyotard. The virtues and vices
attributable to such fragmented subjects
alter in status according to one's
interpretation of fragmentation as either
liberatory or oppressive.

I have said hardly anything about the forms of
architecture associated with Postmodern-
ism. Jameson attributes his own conception
of Postmodernism to the influence upon him
of the very vigorous debate surrounding the
rise of certain stylistic features within the
sphere of architecture. Quite aside from the
'playful' and again stylistically eclectic
surfaces of Postmodern architecture which
contrast with the Utopian high-seriousness of
the 'glass boxes' of Modernists like Le
Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, Post-
modernist architecture exhibits what
Jameson calls "something like a mutation in
built space itself.' 36 Focusing his analysis
upon a particular building, the Bonaventura
Hotel, built in Los Angeles ten years ago by
the architect John Portman, Jameson
presents this building as one which displays -
and as it were constructs - a wholly novel
relation to space, a sort of complete city
compressed into one building. Jameson
admits to having some difficulty describing
this typically Postmodern structure. He
writes:

'I am. ..at a loss when it comes to
conveying the thing itself, the
experience of space you undergo
when you step off (the elevators)
into the lobby or atrium, with its
great central column, surrounded by
a miniature lake, the whole
positioned between the four
symmetrial... towers. ..and surroun-
ded by rising balconies capped by a
greenhouse roof at the sixth level. I
am tempted to say that such space
makes it impossible for us to use
the language of volume or volumes
any longer, since these last are
impossible to seize. Hanging
streamers indeed suffuse this empty
space in such a way as to distract...
from whatever form it might be
supposed to have; while a constant
busyness gives the feeling that
emptiness is here absolutely
packed, that it is an element within
which you yourself are immersed,
without any of that distance that
formerly enabled the perception of
perspective or volume."

The description and analysis of this new
relation of the human subject to built space is
carried on in Jameson's New Left Review
essay for some pages. It is an important part
of his analysis because when coupled with

some of the other themes he discusses the
result is a presentation of Postmodernism as
not merely a new style or set of appearances
but an absolutely novel condition - which of
course echoes Lyotard's title and theme.
Jameson's consideration of the physical
space within Postmodern architecture fits
neatly with his reading of Mandel's theory of
the three distinct stages of machine
production. For the third stage, which
concerns electronic and nuclear devices,
cannot be 'thought' with the old symbolism
applied to, for example, the motor car or
streamlined train, that is. as literal and visual
representations of speed. The computer's
outer shell has no 'emblematic' appeal. This
would seem a trivial point but for the fact that
Jameson wants to 'suggest that our faulty
representations of some immense
communicational and computer network
are. ..but a distorted figuration of... the whole
world system of multinational capitalism.' 38
He terms this new physical and mental
relation to the world the 'postmodern
sublime', 39 and concludes his many-levelled
analysis with an appeal for the making of new
maps with which to orient ourselves within
the Postmodern space, devices which would
be able to 'respect this now enormously
complex representational dialectic' and allow
us to 'begin to grasp our positioning as
individual and collective subjects.' 40 The idea
that it is difficult to conceptualise the totality
of the extension and limits of that space. It
does seem that Jameson is correct to
characterise the Postmodern world as a world
in which particularities of space and temper-
ament are being effaced and replaced with
cultural forms which are peculiarly
American. 41 At the risk of making some fairly
crass connections one might suggest that the
prominent aspects of Postmodernism - the
juxtaposition of disparate styles, the absence
of a sense of history or tradition, and a
concern for what might be called the trivia of
everyday existence - are all features which
imply that American imperialist strategies,
both cultural and military, have succeeded. 42
American art and architecture would then be
the cultural accompaniment to what that
country is socially, an amalgam of different
races and styles of life, all somehow pressed
together into a 'New World'. In the 'new world'
of Postmodernism. History appears to have
come to an end, an event which would
connote that the past can be treated as a
museum, the contents of which relate to each
other on equal terms.

I have concentrated upon the descriptions of
Postmodernism put forward by Jameson and
Lyotard because the theories these two
writers offer cover all the important features
of the debate as it stands in Britain. At least
their work does not seem to have been
superceded by any accounts which give to
the discussion a radically new direction.
Whether or not we have entered a completely
new phase of history is a question which
would seem to be answerable at this point in
time. Some people, like Lyotard, are sure that
we have. Even so, and despite the very clearly
defined work he has produced he leaves the
question of exactly what it is that we have

entered into open. As he said in 1985, the
debate surrounding Postmodernism 'is a
discussion. ..that's only just beginning. It's
the way it was for the Age of Enlightenment:
the discussion will be abandoned before it
ever reaches a conclusion.' 4 '

NOTES

1 This paper is the essentially unrevised text ot a talk given
privately on Friday 13th ot February. 1987 Thenotesare
a later addition

2 In a note at the beginning ot his MLR essay Jameson
makes reference to material published in Foster (ed ) -
see bibliography and note 5 - m Amerlka Sludien/
American Studies 29/ 1 (1984). and to lectures

3. For Derbyshire see bibliography For Bennington see his
The Question of Postmodernism' in Appignanesi (ed).

4 The Warwick conference was held from January J 1st to
February 1st and was entitled Judging Lyotard The
contributions are to be published

5 By Foster (ed ). Lawson and Jencks respectively (see
bibliography)

6 The 6uardian articles appeared from Monday
December 1st See also The Guardian and
Postmodernism' by Paul Kerr m the New Statesman tor
December 12th 1986 (Vol 1 12 No 2907) State of the
Art ran from Sunday January 1 1th. 1987. tor six weeks

7 GuyDebord Society otthe Spectacle Biackand Red.
1983 Daniel Bell The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society. Hememann. 1974

8 NLR 146. p 56

9 Foster (ed). p xn

10 This account is based upon that offered by Matei
Caiinesi.il m his book Faces of Modernity: Avant-
Garde Decadence Kitsch. Indiana University Press.
1977 p 1 32 and following

11 See for example Hassan's POSTmodernISM A Para
critical Bibliography, in his Psracriticisms (1975).
Sontag's The Aesthetics ot Silence', included in A
Susan Sontag Reader (1983). Levin's What Was
Modernism', in his Refractions (1966). Trilling's On
the Teaching of Modern Literature', included in his
Beyond Culture ( 1966); Steiner's In a Post Culture', in
his Extraterritorial (1972)

12 See 'Defining the Postmodern' in Appignanesi (ed.).

13 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer - The Culture
Industry Enlightenment as Mass Deception' in their
Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso. 1979 Theodor
Adorno - Cultural Criticism and Society' in his Prisms
MIT. 1982

14 The Postmodern Condition, p 3

15 Bhstene. p 33

16 Published by New Left Books Foralengthyreviewotthis
work see Late Capitalism' by Bob Rowthorn in New Left
Review 98 (July/ August 1976)

17 Quoted by Jameson in NLR 146. pp 77-78.

18 NLR 146. p 78

19 One-Way Street and Other Writings. New Left Books.
1979 p 89

20 The Postmodern Condition, p 76

21 Revising Modernism. Representing Postmodernism' in
Appignanesi (ed).

22 See for example Defining the Postmodern' in
Appignanesi (ed )

23 See for example Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical
Investigations Basil Blackwell, 1981

24 The Postmodern Condition, p 77

25 The Postmodern Condition, p 5

26 The Postmodern Condition p 63

27 See for example p 82 of The Postmodern Condition.

28 For a critique ot Lyotard see Sim

29 See Jameson (1984 - Foreword' to Lyotard) and also
Jameson's The Political Unconscious. Methuen.
1981

30 See Habernas text in Foster (ed )

31 See 'From Post Structuralism to Postnioriernity' in
Appignanesi (ed )

32 The Postmodern Condition, p. 81

33 The Postmodern Condition, p 74

34 Julia Knsteva. Revolution in Poetic Language
Columbia University Press. 1984. p 22

35. 'Brief Reflections on Popular Culture' in Appignanesi
(ed)

35 Brief Reflections on Popular Culture' in Appignanesi
(ed)

36 NLR 146. p. 80

37. NLR 146. pp. 82-83

38 NLR 146. p. 79

39 I have slightly altered this term (see p 88 of NLR 146)

40 Both quotations are from p 92 of NLR .46

41. Jameson notes the Amencanness (sic) of Postmodern

art - see NLR 146. p. 57.
42 See Kenneth Frampton's pieces on Critical

Regionalism m Foster (ed (and Appignanesi (ed ) And
NB note 41
43 Dhstene. p 35

Postmodernism and the 'Postmodern
Debate': Some Literature

Appignanesi. Lisa (ed > - Postmodernism. ICA Documents'

series (double issue 4 & 5) 1986
Bhstene. Bernard - A Conversation with Jean Francois

Lyotard . Flash Art. No 121. March 1985
Davis. Mike - Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Post

modernism) New Left Review. No 151. May/June

1985
Derbyshire. Philip - No Resolution Camerawork No 32.

Summer 1985
Eagleton. Terry - Capitalism Modernism and

Postmodernism New Left Review No 152. July/ August

1985

Foster. Hal (ed ) Postmodern Culture. Pluto Press. 1985
Harris Howard amd Lipman. Alan Viewpoint A culture of

despair reflections on post modern architecture The

Sociological Review. Vol. 34. No. 4, November 1986.
Jameson. Frednc - Foreword' (in Lyotard < 1984))
Jameson, Fre • - Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic ot

Late Capitalism New Left Review No 146 July/ August

1984

Jameson, Frednc - Postmodernism and Consumer Society
(in Foster (1985))

Jencks. Charles What is Post-Modernism? Academy

Editions. 1986
Latimer, Dan - Jameson and Post Modernism New 'ert

Review No 148, November/ December 1984
Lawson Hilary Reflexivity The post-modern

predicaement Hutchinson. 1985
Lyotard Jean Francois The Postmodern Condition: A

Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press

1984

Lyotard. Jean Francois - Presenting the Unpresentable The

Sublime Artforum April 1982
Lyotard. Jean Francois - Argument Camerawork No

32. Summer 1985 (See also Lyotard s contributions in

Appignanesi (1986))
Morris. Meaghan - "Postmodernity and Lyotard s Sublime

Art A Text No 16. 1984
Sim. Stuart Lyotard and the Politics of Antifoundation

alism Radical Philosophy No 44 Autumn 1986

Appignanesi and Foster are wide ranging anthologies
Camerawork contains other material on Postmodernism as
well as that by Derbyshire and Lyotard The texts by Howard
and Lipman and by Jencks concentrate on architecture
Lawson is concerned with the postmodern aspects of the
philosophers Nietzsche. -Heidegger and Dernda (an
introductory account) See also the special issues ot New
German Critique (No 33. Fall 1984) and the interview with
Jameson m Flash Art No 131 Dec Jan 1987

CRITICAL
REALISM:

Britain in
the 1980s
through the
work of 28
artists

(A Nottingham
Castle Touring
Exhibition)

SIMON
BROWN

Paradoxically, Thatcherism has made a massive contribution to
the politicisation of our cultural life, sexual life, family life,
ethnic identities, health and education.

- Juliet Steyn, from the exhibition catalogue

rHE marginalisation of artists in the
twentieth century, while not
necessarily turning them into political
radicals, has tended to detach them from
allegiance to the ruling groups in society and
from establishment values. Probably most
artists who think politically at all- apart from
a few time-servers, society portrait painters
and conscious eccentrics - would admit to
the ideal of a more just and humane society
than the one we presently enjoy.

During the period from the end of the Second
World War up to the mid-Seventies, it was
possible, and indeed quite usual, to believe
that society was gradually evolving in the
direction of this ideal: the Welfare State would
abolish poverty, the Arts Council would make
the products of high culture accessible to
everyone; the old Puritanisms seemed to be
on the decline, and there was a growing
tolerance for non-standard behaviour in
sexual and other spheres. The latter part of
this period in particular was a time of
optimism and this-worldly Utopias.

Today, anyone who still subscribes to this
belief is certifiable. The dominant political
culture no longer even bothers to pay lip-
service to these ideals. In a world whose
criteria of value are purely commercial, and
where openly avowed greed is once again
respectable, under a government which
increasingly imposes its will by open force,
anything so useless materially as art, and
anything so suspiciously libertarian as
creativity, automatically becomes an act of
political dissent.

Conscious political dissent in art can take
various forms. Some depend on hijacking
icons of the dominant culture and subverting
them to new meanings. Others, like the pro-
Green activities of Joseph Beuvs. aim to
dissolve the barrier separating art from
political action: the creative is political.
Critical Realism, however, rejects this mono-
physite position; here art and political
consciousness co-exist, two natures in one
body, separately and without confusion. Its
formal means are those of nineteenth-
century naturalism and early twentieth-
century expressionism. Its roots go back into
pre-industrial times, as Brandon Taylor
points out in the catalogue. It is, in fact, an old
liberal art (liberal of the Tom Paine, publish-
and-be-damned variety), assuming the artist
as an unattached individual, not involved - as
artist - in the social and political processes
depicted in the work, but looking on as a
sympathetic observer. It also assumes a
public able to make moral judgements and
having a certain amount of power to effect
social change. This makes its relevance to
social change. This makes its relevance to the
contemporary sitation somewhat
problematic.

The artist's status as outsider has a number of
advantages. For example, it allows the artist

to claim a superior insight into a situation
than that of the protagonists themselves. The
artist thus presents herself as a kind of
sociologist of knowledge, or seer-through of
false consciousness, orat least someone able
to see the typical case and not merely the
individual. False consciousness is one of the
exhibition's main themes: the reality behind
the plausible facade, as in Elizabeth
Mulholland's paintings of the 'nice' little town
of Dollar.

Democracy isn't freedom of
press, property or even thought.
It is freedom to know the truth.
Some truths are hard to know.
But what truth can there be in
Thatcherism, propagated by the
gutters of Wapping and the
fastidious public school ethos
of the 'respectable* media?
Thatcherism is an attack on the
struggle of the great mass of
people to understand their lives
and learn the political skills to
control them.

- Edward Bond, quoted in the catalogue

The catalogue describes the section called
'Satire of the Middle Classes' as being about
people 'constructed by culture rather than
in true possession of if For example: the
photographs of Paul Reas. Images of B & Q - a
firm whose activities, by driving smaller
traders out of business and creating a near-
monopoly, contribute to the standardisation
of house interiorsand restriction of consumer
choice (so much for free market economics).
House exteriors also: Spring. Barratt Estate
shows the house with its carefully nurtured
flowers, and the proud owner lovingly
cleaning his car. A car is an inherently dirty
object whose exhaust fumes, by their lead
content, cause mental retardation in
children, and everyone who drives one must
bear partial responsibility for this. But this is
not part of the automobile mythology. Other
parts of the show also deal with myths: those
of football, machismo, militarism; and the
elaborate ideological structures, replete with
insignia, rituals and martyrologies, of the
Loyalists of Northern Ireland. And finally
there are the culturally dispossessed, the
ethnic minorities forced to inhabit the
insalubrious corners of other people's myths
(Tarn Joseph, Sutapa Biswas). •

Most of the works on show have, inevitably, a
negative bias: they are, after all, supposed to
be critical. Some, however, make an attempt
at positive, affirmative images. These are not
reassuring. Many realist artists are much
exercised with the problem of 'accessibility'.
With Joan Dawson's Heroes, I am not sure if
irony is intended or not; but in either case I
am reminded of the social worker who took
elocution lessons in order to speak with an

acceptably working-class accent. The
painting- by its technique, not its content -is
frankly condescending. Ken Currie's Union
Organiser and Welder show the
ambivalence of the pride that people
employed in traditional heavy industry take in
their nevertheless alienated work. Here the
human beings themselves look like industrial
castings, and the technique of mass-
production is reflected in their standard-
issue noses (or is this a case of Lukacsian
'typicality'?). We seem here to be in the
business of making and perpetuating myths
rather than debunking them. Honour by all
means those whose lives were, and are, spent
in mines and foundries and in the shadow of
shipyard cranes. But to present them as hero-
victims, in paintings reminiscent of religious
icons, does them no honour at all. And surely
the whole concept of the Hero, or Type, is
hardly conducive to the realisation by
'ordinary' people of an identity which will be
their own, and precisely not a cultural
stereotype given down to them by someone
else, whether or not he or she claims to speak
on their behalf.

Lukacs, to whom we owe the term Critical
Realism, set great store by the complete-
ness of a work of art: the idea that the art-
work, by being (within its own privileged
space) a unified system where each
component part stood in comprehensible
relation to all others and to the work in its
entirety, imaged a world in which the present
fragmented mode of perception and
experience had given way to a consciousness
of all-embracing totality where everything has
its place within the Whole: an understood
world in which people could freely build their
own destiny. And in this lies the chief
difficulty of making directly political
statements by means of traditional art-forms,
which is what most of the artists in this
exhibition are attempting. A political
statement implies, by its nature, a situation of
incompletion, non-satisfaction, the
possibility and desirability of change -
qualities that contradict those of closure and
resolution that Lukacs rightly sawas essential
characteristics of art-works, at least in the
traditionally understood sense. There is thus,
ironically, a kernel of truth in the
conservatives' reiterated complaint that
'political art cannot be good art'. The
Northern Ireland lithographs of Anthony
Davies eloquently show the contradiction
between aesthetically pleasing form, allied
with impressive craftmanship, and an ugly
reality. This can result in a pleasant sense of
solidarity with the artist, the feeling that you
and the artist are one in your political
convictions. The work arouses emotion, but
also satisfies it - like a plastic equivalent of
the 'Aristotelian' drama that Brecht set his
face against. It reassures, where it might be
better to disturb. And to a greater or lesser
extent this applies to most of the works on
show.

The few works which do have the power to
disturb complacency and provoke thought
are precisely those which do not use the
'closed' traditional media, and are not easily

1 ^ 1

hgl - ft «*

*

}■£

'No Surrender' Anthony Davies (1986).

judged by traditional aesthetic criteria. I am
thinking here partly of J. Kirkwood's
photomontages, but more especially of The
Minefield of Memory by Spence and Martin.
This series o' 14 photographs can be baldly
described as being concerned with the
socialisation of children, exploring the
interface between the social and the
personal. But it does this in extraordinary
depth, because it is a reliving of the
socialisation of one child in particular - the
one buried inside the mind and body of the
adult Jo Spence. (Not for nothing is it

described as 'phototherapy'). Here there is no
typicality which excludes the personal: it is
excruciatingly personal, but the spectator
also feels it as such, and is forced to face
his or her own past with all its concomitant
shame and embarrassment. Catharsis of a
different kind: not one done for us that will
confirm us in what we were before, but one we
are invited to carry out for ourselves, that will
leave us changed. Like non-Aristotelian
drama, perhaps art, to be politically effective,
must be non-Lukacsian.

The face, that image of self,
according to Goffman,
delineates itself in terms of
approved social attributes.
The face symbolically
seeking the social sign of
approved presentation is one
form of necessary catharsis.
Inverse photographic cath-
arsis, the sign as producer of
personal identity, exists in
the work, photographic/
cultural, of Jo Spence whose
'Minefield of Memory' photo-
therapeutic images were
recently seen as part of the
'Critical Realism' exhibition
at the City Art Centre in
Edinburgh.

^f PENCE'S work questions, explores
^ and crosses the gender boundary by
A»-J instilling the photographic work with a
degree of hermeneutic ambiguity and not
narcissistic compulsion from within the safe
conf ines of the roleof 'feminist' photographer.

The margin of visual safety is created by the
symbiosis of photographer/photographed
with the aim of demythologising photographic
practice and logically, one's own subjectivity.
The disparity of consciousness between the
photographer and photographed aims not to
magnify the effects of 'self conscious'
signification but to trace the continuum of
gender and explore gender boundaries by
recreating and reworking the effects of the
other dominated observer aesthetic. The
photograph is merely one snapped moment
of psychic time which has resonance beyond
the image presented. The absorption of the
image decontextualisesthe image itself asour
gaze depends upon the prior beliefs, values
attached to the visual presentation which are
themselves continually questioned.

Jo Spence has manipulated the visual
language to deconstruct gender and
reconstruct herself as the central defining
characteristic of woman's/her individual
identity in our society by sharing with us her
own individual biography - as good/bad
daughter, lover, High St. photographer,
cultural worker, woman with breast cancer.
She/ we have an extensive repertoire of selves
to exhibit, challenge, fuse and entertain
through inner strength -a journey to secure an
inner truth value which is inescapably ours.

The visual language of Jo Spence's ideas has
an assertive and hetergenous quality,
overcoming ironically the bittersweet visual
polemic viz a viz Judy Chicago. Woman as
symbol versus vaginal archetype? The
language feels, communicates directly and
challenges the illusions of our own histories.
Who constructs our visual histories?

TOWARDS
DISRUPTING THE
SILENCED

the images of
Jo Spence

by Lorna Waite

Rejuvenating the practice of feminist cultural
thought, the work of Jo Spence is a welcome
paradigm of and about change.

Twenty-five years have now passed since the
publication of Betty Friedman's The Feminine
Mystique, one of the major literary landmarks
in the recording of woman's experience. She
delineated the cultural conditions of "the
problem with no name" - that ineffable,
vacuous metaphor of the empty woman who
assumed the unrecognisable facade of the
compliant actress, unaware, somatised and
feminine. Have the metaphors changed?

The ways in which feminist theory uses
metaphor gives clues to the supposed
ideological understanding. Ideologically,
understanding feminism results all too often
in conceptual confusion if we perceive the
ideological to be a nonunitary complex of
social practices and systems of

representation which have political
consequences. No ideology is homogenous
yet feminism has this tendency to ideologise
itself - perhaps no language intrinsically
captures the discourse between woman as
subject in revolt against patriarchal society! 1

Symbolically, languageand class increase the
difficulty of escaping the masculine and
feminine positions weassume in thestructure
of society. Spence's photographs illustrate
and capture strains and pain involved in these
positions whilsts describing not prescribing,
remaining panoramic and ambiguous. Her
photographs are metaphors for herself,
metaphors women can easily interpret
because we recognise what they feel like.

Jo Spence's work acts as a retort to the female
instinct popularfeminism which isessentially
a reactionary response to the traditional
concepts of womanhood within male-

Jo Spence from her book 'Putting Myself in the Picture'.

dominated culture for the last two hundred
years. The celebration of woman/ mother as
unique icon of femininity and protector of
humanity, ideas prevalent in the mid-
nineteenth century find their twentieth
century equivalent in the writings of Dale
Spender and Adrienne Rich - indicative of an
orthodox liberal feminism which re-enacts the
superiority of the female and logically
celebrates the biological differences between
men and women. A reworked feminist myth of
the old biology is destiny axiom which informs
the apocalyptic basisof much current popular
feminism. 2

Gender remains yet genderandfemininityare
continually in conflict with themselves -
changing, crossing boundaries, varying in
expression according to race, age, class,
sexual orientation and individual biography.
Jo Spence's photohistory is the problem with
no name - the personal and historical identity
crisis for women, feminism and men. She
continually goes beyond - the female
stereotype, the family album, the false selves
we internalise, continuously reworking
feelings, myths and symbols.

Jo Spence's book 'Putting Myself In The
Picture' published last year has a chapter
entitled 'Beyond The Family Album' which is
central to her views on theory and
practice. 3

The family album acts as a sort of celebrated
time capsule capturing the snapshot reality
which pretends to be the private icon of our
memory of identity, multifarious images
remain static concealing the larger parts of
our childhoods, despising the power
(economic and political truths perhaps) of our
nonfictional lifestory. The depiction of our
lives presented in the family album depends
on the absorption of the condoned ways in
which we record the hopes, wishes, desires of
our parents, our childhood. The creativity of
the camera obscures by depoliticising the
imagemaking process to compose the activity
of the mother/ father/ son in the acceptable
face of conformity. The illusion of familial
harmony is achieved by the creation of myth -
to substitute the unwanted fortheyearned for.

Consequently, the photographer is
disengaged from the photographed which
demands the posed, adorned, arranged. The
smiling, happy, feminine look clicked and
secured by a Kodak Instamatic. Structure,
function, composition and protagonist create
the safe method of photographic alienation
from oursefves. Jo Spence states in 'Putting
Myself In The Picture', "How comfortable it is
to accept the few threadbare old cliches on
offer at every level of signification which
encourage us to be consumers and not
critical producers of imagery from the word
go, involved as we are in a product based

culture and not one in which the processes
are explored in their own right. How do we
move from the 'private' world of the family
with its paucity of self imagery but
plethora of mass produced imagery into the
world of state, industrial and economic
power."

New connections must be made which start
with the reappropriation of the camera - to
create a dialogue with ourselves, a type of
decensorised visual diary keeping.

To disrupt the silenced entails redefinition,
re-imagining ourselves. Jo Spences photo-
graphy democratises how meanings are
produced in images in order to become
creatorsof ourown meaningsasthe processof
representation concords with the subject of
representation. That is, ourselves. The
photograph as emotional mask escapes from
the hidden feminism of the universal woman
yet illustrates different perspectives on
common stagesof development- dealingwith
parents, authority, imposed adolescent
stereotypes etc. Reliving these silences and
disruptions in this way is a methodological
liberation for the visual study of the self.

NOTES

1. See Mary Kelly's chapter, 'On Sexual
Politics And Art', in Framing Feminism: Art
and the Women's Movement 1970-85.

2. For a fuller discussion of these issues see
Lynne Segal's 'Is the Future Female?'
(Virago, 1987).

3. 'Putting Myself In The Picture: A personal,
political and photographic autobiography'
by Jo Spence (Carriclen Press).

Ken Currie

32 Nithsdale Dr.

Glasgow

29th Nov '87

Dear Editor/ Malcolm Dickson,

With reference to your article 'Redundant
Aesthetics and the Cult of Failure' in Variant
3.

I resent your attempts to 'rehabilitate' me
within your cult of failure. The notion that I
have somehow redeemed myself by working
on a public commission in order to
'counterbalance' my 'tenuous link with the art
world' is beyond contempt. Now it seems that,
after your tiresome declamations concerning
my alleged 'sell-out' in the pages of
'Edinburgh Review', you are attempting what
amounts to a u-turn on your opinion of my
integrity as an artist. This feeble retraction of
those hysterically self-righteous allegations
does little to convince me that you are
prepared to admit a major error of
judgement. If you were to simply and clearly
admit that you were wrong, and that your long
awaiting denunciation was in fact premature,
I would not now feel the need to respond.
Instead you pay lip service to my undertaking
of a public commission and then proceed to
associate me with a group of younger artists
with whom I have nothing in common, but
whom you admire and feel that my credibility
can be reconstructed by including me within
their group.

Elsewhere in Variant 3 familiar overtures
about a continuing 'debate' can be heard and
to which I now feel I should respond. The
success of 'New Image Glasgow' dramatically
polarized opinion in the city. We saw many
young artists in reaction to the show,
particularly the alleged hype, suddenly
forging high principle and artistic integrity.
They immediately rallied round the
ideological barricades of both Transmission
Gallery and Variant magazine. At last they
had found a comforting environment in which
to wallow in a kind of suffocating mire of self-
pitying puritanism. Neal Ascherson, whom
you dismiss, remarkably, as an
establishment figure, accurately described
this phenomenon as a 'cult of failure'. Here,
according to Ascherson, 'integrity lies in
failure and deliberate under achievement is a
revolutionary act'. He then pointed out how
this attitude, this mindless detestation of
artistic success in any form was a crucial
element in Scotland's inability to construct a
world-scale national-popular culture; where
blatant 'sour grapes' is frequently disguised
as polemic and bitter envy hidden behind
grandiloquent 'criticism*. Your own
characteristically pedantic attempts were
immediately dismissed as they so obviously
embodied those very features. It is frankly
laughable to suggest that they were ignored
because they were politically uncomfortable.
In fact it was the utter predictability of the
criticism, as well as its breathtaking naivete
about the reality of the art world, that
guaranteed little response from those under
fire. One could only conclude that it was the
axe-grinding of someone isolated, out of
touch and more than slightly hurt by his

LETTERS

marginalisation in the whole phenomenon.

In light of all this I must say that I get
depressed by the tendency of so-called
political artists toward self-imposed
ghettoization, be it in community arts
workshops, artists run galleries or in the
refusal to be associated with 'the market'.
They bask in their own insecurity and fudge
decisive action in the meandering dullness of
'collective co-operation'. Political artists often
neutralise their impact by attaching
debilitating preconceptive labels; creating
little islands of integrity within the system and
playing at being radical without getting their
hands dirty. I believe that one must fight a
'war of position' within the system,
challenging the market in the very heart of the
beast itself.

I feel that much of Transmission and Variant,
far from being a radical popular force, in fact
reinforces widespread prejudice about the
self-obsessed artist, detached,' lonely,
alienated and out of touch with the everyday
reality of people's lives. There is a bombastic
stridency about much of Transmission and
Variant that owes much to a largely outmoded
punk aesthetic, which, like most street
originated culture is, in the end, transitory
and rather fickle. It has committed you to
presenting a boring and largely incoherent
mish-mash of dated art practices from the
seventies - video, performance, installations,
time-based site-specific 'stuff, etc. etc,
mostly pursued in the name of expanding the
boundaries of appreciation, experience and
accessibility of art. In fact, without doubt
these particular mediums are among those
most responsible for alienating the public.
The art and ideas of Tranmission and Variant
are obscure, esoteric, often embarrasingly
pretentious, cold, cerebral and above all
presented with toe-curling self-importance.
They have no wide circulation among those
sections of the populace capable of
undertaking social transformation, namely
the organised working class and its allies.

So what's it all about then Malcolm?

Clearly, you would love to see the demise of
figurative painting, of that profoundly
humanistic urge to paint the image of the
human figure. If the market is the motor force
behind the ascendanscy of diverse national
schools of figuration in the eighties then it is
our responsibility to assert the hegemony of a
democratic figurative art that advances
genuine social and political issues in contrast
to the moral vacuousness of this international
phenomenon. We must fight our battle of
ideas and images at the heart of things, not in
safe ghettoes, not among ourselves and
attempt no less than to produce an art that
has the potential to inspire the imagination of
millions of people. Walter Benjamin argued
quite correctly that painting was in no
position to compete with the power of the

collective experience of cinema, nor the
inexorable mass appeal of the great
spectacle of modern capitalism. However, I
would argue that in our present day world of
shallow, transitory images that flicker
constantly in our lives, there is an awesome
power in the fixed image. The aura of
uniqueness, the wonder of something crafted
by human hands, of being physically
confronted by a fellow human being's
individual vision is a feeling we must
preserve. This is not an argument for the
resurrection of outmoded forms of artistic
experience, nor is it connected in any way
with the values surrounding art that are so
ruthlessly exploited by the market. It's about
the determination to fight for human and
social values in art in opposition to the
increasing vacuousness of modern life. Much
of Transmission and Variant's imagery seeks
to mimic forms found within the spectacle of
capitalism, particularly images derived from
the mass media, such as video. There is a
mistaken assumption that by using forms
derived from the media, one's art is somehow
automatically up to date and an accurate
reflection of contemporary reality. In fact, the
effect of the flickering images of some big
video installation are as empty, monotonous
and unmoving as a bank of tv screens in a
High Street shop. Personally, I'm one
hundred percent committed to figurative
painting, be it on a private gallery wall or in
some vast public space. I believe I can
contribute effectively in the cultural struggle
for social change within that area. Others may
have their own solutions, and there may be
disagreements, but in the end, the objectives
should unite us all.

I have no illusions about recent Scottish art.
In fact I agree with most of your observations
- the ridiculous hype, the absurdity of the
notion of a Scottish Renaissance, the ruthless
falsification of history, the promotion of non-
existent movements, the idea of the 'Vigorous
Imagination' as a comprised survey rather
than an argument, or what Timothy Hyman
recently described as the 'anxious fudging of
every issue just to keep the bandwagon
rolling*. But the fact that you and many of your
contemporaries were not in any of the
exhibitions is not my problem, nor does it
worry me. I participate because I believe that
the wilful marginalisation of one's art in order
to remain pure suits the establishment well.

I propose to continue having 'tenuous links'
with the art world in order to pursue my
inalienable right to earn a living. I object to
your implication that I have somehow
redeemed myself of that fact in public
service. If you intend to continue to sit in
judgement of other artists' work you would do
well to have the courage to admit errors
openly.

Yours sincerely,
Ken Currie

m

u

m

I

*